Why I think "failing fast" should be called "learning quickly"

This week I'm putting the finishing touches to a six-month leadership program with an Asian based market leader in the manufacturing industry. I'm super excited that a little Kiwi business like mine, based entirely remotely, can be working with a global market leader. The amount of learning I have done over the last 3 years to reach this point is enormous!

Whilst my team and I were discussing the ins and outs of the kick-off workshop I was emailed a summary copy of the book that's in my newsletter this week, Fail fast. Fail often by Ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz. They are psychologists, career counselors, and creators of the popular Stanford University course “Fail Fast, Fail Often,”

I had a scan read of the book and found myself fundamentally disagreeing with its title because the core principles in there are much more positive than it suggests. Now that's not to say it's a bad book. It absolutely isn't. And the Stanford university course has been famous for a while. However, I think the language of failure still tends to conjure up a sense of dread and anticipation in anyone who thinks about it. 

Another conversation I had this week was about trauma-informed learning; whereby we tend to remember trauma vividly and it shapes our lives to impact the way we act in the future. In the military, we call it battle scars! Battle scars are hard-earned and the British military has done an increasingly amazing job at debriefing people who have experienced trauma and helping them reframe and apply that experience into something more positive. In business, we call it a mess-up, a product failure, a massive loss, a write-down on the balance sheet. We need to acknowledge the impact failure has on people, in the knowledge that trauma can disrupt future performance. 

There are still many organizations that, whilst they talk about being supportive and developmental, are unable to tolerate failure. The reality is a failure is still a failure to them and therefore a high-level risk that cannot afford to be taken by most employees. I've also noticed that most organizations have a Learning and Development function not a Failing and Development function. I wonder why this is?

Now I don't know about you but in my mindset, using a positive language and framing nearly always has an advantage to a negative one from a mindset perspective. So instead of failing fast, I prefer to use the term learning quickly. Some of you might think that this is just linguistic semantics however from a little project I did about a year ago I actually found that groups we talked to about failing fast with were less likely to take risks because they still held that trepidation of failure. Those who we talked to about learning quickly were more ambitious, took more courageous steps, and stretched further than the "Failers" - for a bunch of neuroscientific reasons I won't delve into here. A better outcome from a simple shift in language.

A recent IBM report outlines that the most important skills for future employees and their leaders are, a willingness to be flexible, agile, and adaptable to change - people need the ability to learn!

CEOs rank investment in people as the #1 way to accelerate performance for organizations of the future - Organizations need to help people learn - faster and more efficiently.

When I coach my clients, each session we set up an Experiment, for something they are going to try as a leader, between sessions. It's deliberately called an Experiment because it's designed with an informed hypothesis and an expected outcome in mind.

This expected outcome may or may not be reached. If it is successful we want to understand why. If it isn't we also want to understand why to work out what we could do differently next time, and ongoing. At no point do we want to think about it as a failure. We want to think about why the experiment didn't go as expected and reflect on the learning hidden within to build our experience.

This coaching approach was informed from when I was learning about Lean methodology and the Toyota Production System. The Japanese engineers were as equally interested in, whether they produced Y percent more or less in a set time when they intended to complete X. The hypothesis was that the result will be X. So if the result was plus or minus Y, the experiment hadn't got hadn't gone as planned and they wanted to understand it and learn why. There were many innovative breakthroughs made in this way.

Organizations post COVID have an enormous opportunity to learn quickly. Their client's customers and colleagues are also doing a reassessment of their business models, products, and services. There is an opportunity to learn quickly through collaboration and informed hypotheses on what to do next. There's also scope to run multiple experiments against controls to essentially A/B test hypotheses. 

I believe the same applies to leading teams. So how can you support your teams to learn quickly? Here are three tips. 

Try using phrases like - "Let's try. I wonder what would happen if. How might you"?

This encourages an experimental curiosity. Then, if things don't go as planned, instead of focusing on what didn't go well, ask employees what they did, and then play your part by encouraging them to uncover what they learned, and apply this learning. Inevitably some employees will fail. But they are already going to be beating themselves up for that as their own worst critics, so you don't need to wade in and help.

Try to create low stakes learning opportunities before the stakes become higher.

I often use the phrase with leaders - "how can you let them graze their knees and not break their legs"? Learning happens when things don't go as expected and so if you are able to help employees experience this learning earlier in their careers, or when it won't bring down the company in flames, you should try and do so. Make sure you are there to pick them up, dust them off, and set them back on track with supportive words of encouragement. 

Try to share some of your own learning. Admitting our own mistakes is hard. We want to preserve our own infallibility amongst our teams. However if we can address those moments and the learning we gained, we as leaders, demonstrate humility, but also humanity. This is also encouraging to younger or less experienced team members that they can try things.

At no point am I saying that you should encourage or embody being flippant, rash or ill-considered in your actions. Or that actions shouldn't have consequences. Times are stressful enough as they are. However, your approach to this small change can make a big difference.

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