Create a Culture Where Failure Isn’t Punished
Improvement requires introspection
Hey there 👋
My name is Conor. I’m helping shape how teams work at Hugo, bringing together your meetings, notes, and tasks all in one place.
If you’re enjoying the newsletter, click the button below to share it with a friend. Help get Future of Teamwork to 1K subscribers!
All experiments have an objective, a hypothesis, and a result. After predicting an outcome and then seeing what happens, the next step is evaluation, which forms the basis for the next experiment. This is adaptability in a nutshell.
Intrinsically related to doing this successfully, however, is building a culture where it is okay to be wrong.
👩💻 Cunningham’s Law
Cunningham’s Law humorously states that “the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.” It’s funny because it’s true. But the internet isn’t the only place where being wrong can be the fastest path to being right; just being wrong in general can be a great way to learn.
You can only make use of this principle, though, if your culture doesn’t punish well-meaning failure.
When you’re a little bit right, there isn’t very much to motivate you to do better. Average results are often expected. But from a learning perspective, it’s actually much better to experience lackluster results.
The pain demands introspection. The sting of failure invites new ideas. What went wrong? What do we need to change? In the face of average results, you will almost never ask those important questions. And that's a loss.
🚀 Seeking failure
As you increase your adaptability, connectedness, and tempo, you will be wrong more often than you’re used to. Embrace it. Revel in it. Don’t allow errors to fill you with self-doubt and to hamper your momentum. They are the best way to accelerate your learning. Thank the failure for what it taught you, brush yourself off, and get up and try again.
You can teach your team to do the same thing. As a group, when your culture embraces failure, your team will be more willing to make mistakes that lead to even higher outcomes. The last thing that you want is everyone to play everything safe.
If I’ve convinced you that seeking failure is worthwhile, be clear with your team next time you start a new project:
“We are going to do this thing, acknowledging that it may not work out exactly as we planned, but that’s okay. We will learn more from our failures than from our successes.”
Here are a few other tips to be more experimental and adaptable, and to help you embrace the possibility of failure:
Reframe the idea of failure as learning: When referencing what hasn’t worked in the past, cite it as something you have learned, not something that went poorly.
It’s okay for takeaways to be a series of questions: Always concluding team discussions with decisions and solutions can be limiting.
Implement a place to track experiments: By declaring some decisions to be experiments, you are leaving room for the possibility that they might be incorrect. Putting them all in one place will help you use the results.
📚 Reads of the Week
Emotional Resilience in Leadership
It’s no secret that this summer has been an especially difficult time for emotional resilience and avoiding burnout. This report has some interesting data points in it. Also, love that people are commenting on this. Feels like an interactive seminar.
Remote Onboarding Practices
I enjoyed this thread that dives into best practices for remote onboarding. Most of us have been scrambling to put something together here, so this is timely. I also appreciate that it’s from the employee’s point of view.
What to Talk About in 1:1s
Julia Evans has not only an impressive archive of great blog posts but also some really fun “zines” to check out. This one is particularly helpful next time you need a topic of discussion for your recurring 1-on-1.
Thanks for reading Future of Teamwork this week! Did anything stand out? I’d love to hear about it. Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat 😁
Until next time,
Conor