Seth Godin, entrepreneur and acute observer of life, wrote, “I’ve been doing it wrong all along This is one of the great benefits of learning. It’s also a common challenge. When we get better at something, it is preceded by a moment of incompetence. In that moment, we’re not exactly sure how to do it better, but we realize that the way we’d been doing it wasn’t nearly as useful.”
Often we humans are resistant to acknowledging we have been wrong and that change would be a good thing. Reading Thomas Merton this weekend, I saw, “A humble man is not afraid of failure.”
Godin proceeds with an example: It can be something prosaic–I learned last week that I’d been preheating my dosa pan for too long, and that’s why (paradoxically) they weren’t becoming crispy. Years of consistent behavior overturned in one moment. Or it can be something more profound, changing our perceptions of others and ourselves. If you need to be proven right, learning is a challenge. If you’re eager to be proven wrong, learning is delightful.
This fits with a podcast I heard last week from Guy Kawasaki’s “Remarkable People.” He talked with Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson. Her latest book ‘Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well,’ describes three kinds of failure.
- The good kind of failure, which I call intelligent failure. We can call a failure intelligent when it is genuinely novel territory. We are in pursuit of an opportunity. We’ve done our homework, we’ve thought about what might happen, and we’ve designed a test of that hypothesis and finally, the failure is as small as possible to still be able to learn from it. You don’t want to make bigger bets than you have to in uncertain territory.
- The other two kinds of failures we do want to prevent. The simplest kind of failure I call a basic failure, and it’s basic because it has a single cause. That single cause is usually human error. I put the milk in the cabinet instead of in the refrigerator and the milk spoils, so that’s a basic failure. That’s one that’s pretty trivial, but it’s one that happens because we’re not paying attention or we’re not maybe trained in an activity that we’re trying to do, we haven’t had enough training, we haven’t done our homework, what have you. Those are obviously not worth celebrating.
- The third kind is what I call complex failures and they are, as the title suggests, multi causal. They generally happen because of a complex mix of factors. Some of them external, some of them internal. They come together in just the wrong way to produce a bad outcome. A supply chain breakdown during a global pandemic is a complex failure. The supply chain has struggled to deliver the goods and services that needed to because of a combination of things, people sick and not able to come to work, a shipping route’s being disrupted, storms that might happen and exacerbate the whole thing.
Are you leading an organization or only your life. You try something, it fails, you learn and move on. Some you are just not paying attention. Maybe more training would help. Some are from a system. You must periodically review your systems and see if they are still your servants—or are you their servant.
Gary Mintchell
Faith Venture 