In my discussions with designers and design leaders a recurring issue that comes up is failure. Working in complex environments like today’s organisations I view failure as necessary to the experimentation process, and critical for learning and adapting.
At the same time, I see on an individual level as well as organisations a real fear of failure. (I can confirm this in myself).
I have been thinking about failure a lot recently. Here are a few practical ways I think we can ’squeeze the juice out of failure’ a bit more:
success or failure - We oversimplify failure by viewing it as a polarity.
Before we launch into something, or even in the midst of it, let's imagine that failure is one of the possibilities.
We often think about what a success would look like but a better question might be what does success AND failure look like?
What's the worst thing that could happen?
Try to imagine together a range of possibilities that could happen so we move away from the extreme poles of the situation
We view fear of failure as a physical threat.
When your brain detects a threat it starts to shut down the part of your brain that allow curiosity and critical thinking. These are the skills that are needed when working with complexity and change.
As we're going along we need to notice, as best we can when our fear triggers, kick in, and what's going on in our brain?
Are our egos threatened or are they afraid?
Reflect over the experience of failure
Stopping along the way or talking with one another at the end and asking what did you experience?
How did failure show up?
What did it look like?
How are we going to make sense of it?
What did we learn from this?
These questions allow both individuals and teams to make sense of these emotions so they are less dramatic when we fail again.
Failure is inevitable and something we should not let identify ourselves. One failure does not label us. As humans we need to accept this and not stop us from experimenting and learning.
I will finish off this post with something that I share with all of my coaching clients (and a very wise coach said to me).
Be kind to yourself.