Learning Agility: Failing to Learn

Isfailing to learn, in itself, a useful path to learning?

Intheir 1991 book Art and Fear, David Bayles and TedOrland tell the story of a ceramics teacher who split his class into two equalgroups. The first group was to be graded on the quantity of pots theyproduced, while the second group would be graded on quality—and theirability to produce a “perfect” pot.

Whenit came time to grade, students were surprised to discover that, in the processof producing many pots, the “quantity-focused” group actually produced betterquality pots than the group that had perfection as their goal.

It’sa memorable story about the power of rapid experimentation over perfectionism.And it’s partly memorable because it’s so alien to our culture, where failureis a dirty word.

Psychological safety

Failurehas been at the heart of my research around learning agility forindividuals and organizations.

There’sbeen interesting researcharound the role of games in encouraging experimentation and aplayful approach to problem solving. But perhaps the most compelling findingscame from Google in their investigation of high performing teams during their Project Aristotle initiative.

Namedfor Aristotle’s quote that, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,”this project represents a robust data-driven investigation into what makesteams work. One of their key findings was that psychological safety was centralto high performance.

Psychologicalsafety has been championed by the likes of Harvard professor AmyEdmondson, and involves providing an environment where peoplefeel respected, are heard, and are encouraged to share their work, theirchallenges, and yes … their failures.

Thealternative to psychological safety is an environment of blame and shame, wherethere is no place for vulnerability or honest sharing.

The Blame Game

In2009, academics Nathanael Fast and Larissa Tiedens conducted anexperiment where they divided a test group into twocohorts. They provided each cohort with a different article about then-CaliforniaGovernor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s failed attempt to pass several propositions.

Inthe first article Schwarzenegger took full responsibility for the fail. In thesecond version he blamed political partisanships and special interest groups.Interestingly, the group that read the blame article were much more likely toblame others for failures in their subsequent exercises.

Thiswork seems to confirm what you probably thought intuitively—that blame isextremely contagious and particularly influenced by leadership examples.Fortunately, there are a number of strategies that can shift blame, which aresummarized in Figure 1 from the Learn2Learn app.  

Figure 1: How to end the blamegame

Return on failure

Oneof the most useful models I’ve found in relation to failure was put forward byJulian Birkinshaw and Martine Haas in a 2016 article. I’ve slightly adaptedtheir definition below.

Figure 2 : Returnon Failure formula developed by Birkinshaw and Haas, used with permission

It’sa simple but powerful concept that focuses on increasing returns by:

• Increasing actionable insights through deeper analysis and reflection, or
• Decreasing resources invested through prototyping or failing faster.

Let’slook at each of these in a little more detail.

Actionable insights

Partof discovering insights beyond a particular fail is the ability to “dig deeper”beyond face value to reveal underlying systemic issues. This might involverepeatedly asking “why” in order to move from a first order cause to a rootcause.

Forexample, about four years ago I was the lead solution designer on ahalf-million dollar project for a major Telco. The job involved arming productmanagers with a range of new skills and was an opportunity for us to roll out apowerful 70:20:10-inspired solution that encouraged informal and on-the-joblearning.

Unfortunately,by the criteria we established and based on the relatively short run of theprogram … it failed.

Partof the challenge was that the delivery team struggled in rolling it out. Forexample, they decided our 15-minute webinars, which were designed to scaffoldon-the-job experiences, were impractical. Instead they bundled them up into asingle two-hour webinar at the beginning of the program!

Inthis instance, the first order cause was the failure of the delivery team whichwas an initial focus for our anger and frustration. However, asking “why”several times led to a root cause—we had not taken time to understand thedelivery team’s pain, needs, and capability.   

Reactingto the first order cause might have led to replacing the delivery team.Instead, responding to the root cause, this experience became the catalyst forus to adopt design thinking to better empathize with and understand keystakeholders. This powerful transformation has meant that the initial failurehas more than paid for itself since.

Resources invested

Theother side of the equation is reducing the amount of resources invested. Theobvious way to do this is to adopt an iterative and prototyping strategy.

Idefine prototypes as a way to create previews of an end experience. My preferenceis to prioritize low fidelity prototypes, which might consist of sketches,comic-styled walk throughs, or wireframes.

Forexample, in an onboarding program, a client wanted to “show, not tell” valuesaround innovation and embracing technology. One suggestion from our co-designprocess was to use a simple chatbot as part of the first three-month experience.

Iwas sold on the idea—who doesn’t want to build a chatbot? The co-design groupwere excited, so we progressed to low fidelity prototyping.

Inthis instance, we created a three-page comic describing the first day, thefirst week and the first month of one of our personas—the comic showed herreceiving chatbot prompts and check-ins via her phone.

Theco-design group used these comics to field test the approach. I briefed them touse the process to better understand our audience rather than defending ouridea, so they dutifully asked multiple “why” questions and tried to empathize.

Theydiscovered our audience resented the idea of personal phones being used forwork, and a significant group feared that a chatbot would mean managers wouldplay a more hands-off role.

Inthis way, we were able to fail fast, as we quickly moved on to other ideas thatdid resonate with the audience.

Thatraises an important point about prototypes. Rather than simply testing the ideain general, I’ve found it crucial to ask what part of this idea is most likelyto fail?

For example, some time ago we were considering rolling out a coaching initiativeto support a broader behavioral change program. The obvious potential failpoint was that managers would not prioritize the required coachingconversations.

Toquickly test this, we generated a list of potential manager tasks, includingthe coaching tasks we needed them to do, and asked a range of managers to rankthem in priority. The required coaching conversations were ranked at the bottomof their lists, which gave us valuable information on how to proceed.

Final points

Thisis an opening salvo in a much bigger topic and it’s a call to action.

Pleaselet me know about your adventures in failure—the times when you havegained insight by failing to learn. How are you encouraging psychologicalsafety? What strategies do you have to identify failure and dig down to theroot cause? And how do you minimise resources invested in failure?

Tellme your stories via the comments here, linkedin, or twitter.

I’llbe sharing more stories and tips on embedding a positive culture around failurein upcoming articles, so stay tuned for future columns.