Encouraging failure in your team
This sign from my daughter's school is pretty apt. If we try to make things look too pretty, we might not be learning (and teaming) well.
Getting meaningful work done in complex environments is best suited to teams. Real teams. Not "teams" by name or on an organisational chart that don't work together in any meaningful way. An interdependent group of small individuals who have complementary skills and work towards a common outcome. Real teams.
This is an important concept to keep in mind as we explore failure in teams. By definition, complex environments do not have a linear connection between cause and effect. We can see patterns, we can make predictions based on our observations and increasing amounts of data...and we can still be wrong. In fact, it's very likely that we will make mistakes. While it's unlikely that you and your teammates will go about deliberately failing or making the wrong decision, it's pretty close to inevitable!
The question for teams is, therefore, not "will we fail?". It is more like "how will we respond when we fail?".
To put a bit more context behind this, I'll refer to the great work of Professor Amy Edmonson. Perhaps Edmonson's most wide reaching influence has been to raise the profile of psychological safety. This is an important (and often misunderstood) concept that has huge implications for team performance. I'll write more on that another time, but the crux of it is evident in this piece of research. In studying medical teams across hospitals with high stakes, Edmonson discovered a counterintuitive finding.
The teams that were performing best reported the highest error rates.
How could that be? It goes against a lot of what we might expect. Until we dig a little bit deeper. It's important to remember that those were the teams that reported the highest error rate. This is likely to be different to the actual error rate. If we can assume that error rates are similar across teams (with similarly experienced and skilled professionals), then the reported error rate is more reflective of the response that the team and its members have to failure. The problem is not errors (everyone is likely to make them), the problem is failing to share them. Teams can't learn from what doesn't get shared.
The best teams spend less time covering up or pretending that mistakes haven't happened. They spend more time acknowledging them, sharing them, learning from them and adapting to improve their performance (i.e. learning!).
Some questions for you to consider this week:
How well do you and your team share your failure?
What would it look like if your team made better use of failure?