Daniel Pink’s latest Pinkcast episode focuses on learning from failure.
He discusses Tina Seelig’s suggestion to her students to write a failure résumé listing some of the bigger mistakes they’ve made in their personal, education and professional journeys along with what they learned in each instance. While this can be a humbling exercise, it is also a great way to remind ourselves of how we have grown through adversity. Such a personal exercise is not expected to be shared with others although it might be useful if you are asked that ubiquitous question in an interview “What’s your biggest failure?”.
But could this idea also apply within the larger context of a long-lived team or even a company?
There are a number of benefits of sharing our failures including:
- Reducing the likelihood of making the same mistakes
- Increasing the level of psychological safety
- Deflating the egos or hubris of key decision-makers
Of course, it is important that what is shared does not point the finger at specific individuals. Very rarely are work screw-ups the fault of a lone person and if we want to encourage team behavior we need to accept our losses as well as the wins as a team.
For obvious reasons we wouldn’t want to share this information externally. While there might be some benefits in doing so such as increasing the level of trust others place in our team or company or in helping other groups to avoid repeating our mistakes, the confidentiality lapses and competitive disadvantages would outweigh these benefits.
So what form might a team or company’s failure résumé take?
A celebratory event is a common approach but the learnings and impact will lessen once the event is over. So how about a hall of failure?
Many companies will create a gallery of the accolades they’ve received in the lobby areas on their headquarters so perhaps having a similar display in an employees-only area of the building such as the cafeteria might help to keep the learnings fresh. Then, whenever a celebration of failure is held, the team could create a poster detailing the mistakes made and the key learnings derived.
For dispersed organizations or for those in which the leadership team is concerned about dedicating physical space for such an undertaking, an online hall could be created but to keep it front of mind, it should be visible from the home page of the company’s intranet.
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” – Robert F. Kennedy
(If you liked this article, why not read my book Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice which contains 100 other lessons on project leadership? It’s available on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca as well as a number of other online book stores)
Easy in theory, difficult in practice 