Weeknotes #11 — Learning to fail or failing to learn?

(Published initially January 2018)

I skipped weeknotes last week ‘cos I often finish them on a Sunday but last Sunday I was happily knackered and my social pot was empty. I’d spent the previous day travelling to/from London to attend the wonderful UKGovCamp.

Fail well?

I’ve been thinking about failure over the last couple of weeks. Yup, I’m not sharing the context or the detail as my weeknotes will continue to not be fully open. (By my reckoning, being a bit open is better than not-at-all-open). Popular culture and agile voices bang on about fail fast, fail lots, fail quick, fail first, yadda yadda.. It’s not that easy or simple. Obviously.

Compared to my younger self I can be comfortable with failure. I didn’t learn to be mentally stronger by not having been weaker and ‘failed’ in the past. I’ve learnt to be bolder (by my standards) by sometimes failing to speaking up and experiencing how negative that was afterwards. I’ve done the work. Still doing it.

I know my failures have fine-tuned me.

It’s harder with other people though. When I see someone (a child, a colleague, a friend) about to get something incorrect, make choices which you expect to be wrong or ignore sound advice— do I step in or out? Do I keep watching or look away?

People make decisions, or decide not to make them, based on information (in it’s broadest sense) and intuition available to them at the time and I’m sticking with that simplistic statement for the purposes of now. I ask myself:

What influence do I have?

What power and responsibility do I have?

What’s the impact of the failure?

I’ve got to remind myself to throw in:

Why is my focus sometimes on ‘The Failure’?

Mind your language.

Fail isn’t the best word and, anyway, who defines what failure is and when? Something may be fail tomorrow but, (very importantly) within the right setting, that something could lead to a larger win in the longer term. Of course what you think or do today can be different to what you did last month — you have may learnt during the time between.

What and who informs which is most valuable — short term fail vs long term win?

It’s not how to support people to fail, it’s — how can I support people to learn?

I’ve got to remember to ask all the right questions .

It’s about adapting, persisting, learning and being resilient.

Quick note on digital

Digital services aren’t magic. It’s ultimately created by humans and is fallible. This isn’t said often enough in some places and people feel they’ve been sold a flawless digital future and then get unsurprisingly grumpy when techies tell them — ‘of course it’ll have few issues’.

The repeat

I’ve remember I mentioned failure in a pre-weeknotes post:

Gear change: I’m starting to read again

I’ve broke myself back in easily and gobbled up ‘How to be Champion’ by Sarah Millican. Prompted by a friend after I’d written about #joinin. I’m not a big fan of her comedy and I thought her book would be entertaining cheesy fluff (technical term). I bloody loved it. The chatter style of her writing presented a depth greater than I was expected. (Note to self next time: do not judge quick and do not be pretentious). I’ve got a stack of books taller than me to read and too many blogs/articles bookmarked — often shared by other weeknoters. As we’re still in January, I’m gonna make that my belated/no-pressure resolution — read more of the good stuff.

And finally…

It was the inaugural joint meetup between agile Sheffield and Sheffielddevops last week. Great turn out, lots of chatter and the event seemed to go well. A request for feedback has gone out and it’ll be interesting to read what we can learn from for next time.