The Secret to Stronger Teams and Programs

This third episode in the series on transitioning to adulthood explores the role of a “fail safe” culture in autism transition programs—creating psychological safety by normalizing small, low-risk failures as learning opportunities. Mike recounts a bowling outing where a participant became aggressive, prompting a blame-free review that revealed environmental triggers and delayed return of the participant’s iPad. Instead of punishment, the program focused on transparency with parents, better training, and improved situational awareness. Drawing from Amy Edmondson’s The Right Kind of Wrong, Mike highlights that the best programs replace blame with curiosity, growth, and fun for both participants and staff.

Chapters

• 0:08 Introduction & Episode Focus
• 1:03 What Is a Fail Safe Culture?
• 1:59 Bowling Alley Incident
• 2:46 Crisis Response
• 3:37 Root Causes Identified
• 5:26 Principles of a Fail Safe Culture
• 6:17 Improving Training & Awareness
• 7:11 Learning from Productive Failures

Transcript

Mike Carr (00:08):

Welcome back this week to another episode. This is actually our third episode on transitioning to adulthood and aging out your school system. And last episode we talked about any transition program needs to offer parents hope. We started John 13, J13.org to do exactly those things. We just entered summer camp, we serve 20, 20 different folks during those camps periods, having fun, getting out into the community. Now that our community program started back up, I wanted to go back to the question I left everyone with last time was, what's the one phrase, right? What's the one keyword you need to look for in any transition program? And there was an article last month on July 10th in Forbes Magazine by Aaron Edgell. And Aaron talked about this phrase, and I thought it was interesting to reference this article. Include the link in the show notes and the phrase is a fail safe culture.

(01:03):

So what's a fail safe culture, right? Fail safe is sort of an interesting word. Well, here's how Aaron defines it. It's a culture where leaders build psychological safety by normalizing small low risk failures. What does that mean? Normalizing small low risk failures. It goes on to say teams learn to view failure as feedback, not as something to fear. So in the setting of our community, in transitioning to adulthood out of school, what's fail safe culture mean? So here's a real story and imagine this is your son in our program, this actually happened. So I want to sort take you through the story and then how we handled it. So your son was having a great time at a bowling alley. So we took all the guys out to a bowling alley, guys and balls in this particular bowling alley was Uncle Buck's, fishbowl and Grill and Round Rock, Texas, which is a suburb just north of Austin.

(01:59):

And it's really cool. It's got these lanes and the whole ambience is the ocean. So you've got sharks and big fish and pictures and the lighting is sort of fun and gives you that sort of aqua vibe, that ocean vibe. And he was having a great time. And then all of a sudden he stands up and he goes after one of the staff in a very aggressive man. He is like, oh my gosh, what's going on? And so the senior staff member intervened and got your son. Let's say this was your son outside. But in the process of trying to get him to calm down, your son scratched the staff member in the face. This actually happening on the neck and ended up punching her in the face to where she thought she was going to have a full back eye. It's like, oh my God, what's going on here?

(02:46):

And so what happened was ultimately you get the emergency phone call, mom or dad gets the emergency phone call, Hey, we can't calm your son down. You need to come get him at the bowling alley. And so the rest of the crew went back in the van like we normally do. But staff had to spend time with your son waiting for you to show up and explained to you, man, this was awful, this aggressive behavior. And it's like you're thinking, oh my gosh, what happened? Is this some kind of new medical condition? My son hardly ever does this. It's just like, oh, I'm so sorry. And you're going to get kicked out on another program. Well, that's not what happened. Here's the key. So the entire team stayed after hours that afternoon and they went through a postmortem, what up to this behavior, what caused this?

(03:37):

And everyone shared openly and honestly what they were doing. And that's part of the fail safe culture, right? We're not talking about blaming, we're just talking about understanding. We have to be able to address this ahead of time before it devolves into punching and scratching because this staff member, quite frankly, had to take a couple days off after this event and she'd been dealing with this population for over 12 years. So she was very seasoned. She is very seasoned. She's got a master's in this space, worked with lots of folks. She had take a few days off to just heal physically. These scratches hopefully healed without leaving scars. And emotionally, this was a big deal, as you can imagine for anybody. And so we were trying to figure out what in the world happened. We discovered three things. The team discovered three things that led to this event, not keeping it autism friendly, not keeping it sensory friendly.

(04:35):

And the third one was not keeping it neurodiverse friendly. That was taking away your son's iPad, his voice, and then not returning it quickly when he asked for it back appropriately was ridiculous. So bottom line was your son did not get kicked out of the program for this aggressive behavior, even though that kind of aggression would've gotten kicked out of probably any other program. And the staff member did not lose her job because there was no malice in what she was doing. She was trying to have fun. She was trying to joke why she had done with other individuals, other community members. And then we informed the parents this idea that, look, we're not going to try to hide anything. This was our mistake. We failed and we want to let you know that we did fail and how we failed and then we were learning from it.

(05:26):

These are all things that fail safe culture is really all about. And so lemme just recap what in our minds we've tried to do at John 13 and what you should look for in any kind of transition program, recognizing ahead of time that everyone's going to fail more than once, not punishing anyone for failure. That was an honest mistake without any malice and being honest and upfront about what really happened from everyone's perspective. Talk it through. What did you see? What was going on? Well, it was too noisy. The weight lines were longer than normal and not trying to hide anything from other team members, you might lose your job. Or from the parents who might be upset, let's be honest. Let's share with them exactly what happened, why it happened, and what we're going to do to fix it next time. So you learn from the failures, right?

(06:17):

You can't eliminate all of them, but you can certainly mitigate. You can be more aware. So we're trying to improve our training. We're trying to improve each team member's situational awareness. We're trying to be more proactive, right? And alleviate that stress, eliminate those challenges before someone boils over and has a meltdown. Now, if you're still not convinced, fail safe culture is the right way to go. There's a variety of stuff out on the web. One of the books you might want to get by Amy Edmondson, and she's an industrial psychologist, has a PhD, is a university professor. And the book's titled The Right Kind of Wrong, the Science of Failing Well, failing Well. And so I'll put a link to the book in the show notes, in the blog post. But basically I think what she's talks about in the book is we want to all avoid the harmful failures.

(07:11):

The failures that can really create some damage or some safety issues. But at the same time, we want to tolerate and maybe even encourage productive failures where we can learn from them. We can all grow for them. We can better understand your son or your daughter's specific needs and how to work with them in a very positive way. Might still be challenging, right? Might not be easy. They're going to grow from it and our team's going to grow from it. And so any transition you seek out, we think should support that fail safe culture, a culture that encourages try new things that replaces blame or that shame or that fear with curiosity, with growth, with excitement, and with fun. That's what we try to do every day at January 13. And we hope you can find a transition program that does the same for you and your kiddo. Until next week, have a great one. See you.