A Job Done Well - Making Work Better

Embrace Failure and Succeed

• Jimmy Barber and James Lawther • Season 2 • Episode 12

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Good/bad, happy/sad, success/failure—we are conditioned to fear failure, but it's essential for learning, growth, and innovation.

This week, we review the research into failure and share our experiences and perspectives. Listen to help you understand and develop a positive relationship with one of life's most prevalent natural resources.

If that's not enough, we also share some TV recommendations. Though we recorded this before Rivals came out; otherwise, it would have made Jimmy's list!

To find out more, contact Jimmy or James.

Hello, I'm James. Hi, I'm Jimmy and welcome to a Job Done Well, a podcast that helps you improve your performance enjoyment at work.

James:

Good afternoon, how are you doing? I'm doing very well, thank you very Today, we

Jimmy:

Today, we are going to explore our relationship with

James:

Oh, I'm good on failure, I've had a lot of that.

Jimmy:

that. Exactly, me too. And so let's talk about failure it's importance in terms of learning, improvement, success, happiness. So we're going to explore that subject today.

James:

Okay, very good. Right then. but before we do that, what have you been up to?

Jimmy:

up to? So I have, been binge watching TV recently. It's no surprise. Now, contrary to popular belief, it's not Love Island, Below Deck, or any of the other trash TVs that I tend to watch. But I have got a recommendation for you for a decent program. Now, Slow Horses. it's www. slowhorses. com book that's been turned into a TV series. Gary Oldman, genius. He is absolutely incredible. He plays this grubby spy chief and literally, I mean, the way he plays, you can smell him through the TV. It's horrible. And the other one is Yellowstone. The main character in Yellowstone, as far as I'm concerned, is the countryside. It's amazing. So there's two TV recommendations for

James:

Oh, thank you very much. Well, the first one, Slow Horses, Mick Harrod. Yeah, I've read the book, mate.

Jimmy:

You would. So, so much more intellectual. You've read the book, I've watched the TV show,

James:

now, if you talk TV shows if, particularly people who live around Nottingham, you must, much, must watch Sherwood. Which is the, sort of, thriller,

Jimmy:

Oh yeah, I watched the first series. There's another one out, isn't it?

James:

The second one has got the scariest middle aged woman I've ever come across in my entire life. And I know several scary middle aged women, but it's just fantastic. So, there's my recommendation. A bit of a bit of organized Nottingham crime. Right. Zack. Nottingham Shotting him. Yeah. Yeah. Shotting here. Well, yeah. But I don't think it's any worse than any other city. Is it really?

Jimmy:

it really? No, I put my mind to it. I could

James:

no. I think actually, if I put my mind to, I could go and get stabbed in any bar in Nottingham within about 20 minutes. Are they? It's not difficult.

Jimmy:

It's not difficult.

James:

So anyway, moving away from crime within Nottingham. To do with failure is sweep it into the carpet and then keep it to yourself.

Jimmy:

Exactly, and I think that's what we're all basically trained throughout our lives to do. But failure isn't a negative thing. When we were discussing this, we looked at it two ways. individual failure, which, enables you to learn in the end of the day. If you don't try stuff out, if you don't fail at things, test things out, you can't learn. So that enables, personal and professional success in my view.

James:

There's that. dreadful American thing. Most American things are dreadful. I hope we haven't got any American listeners. Well,

Jimmy:

don't have now. We actually do have.

James:

about

Jimmy:

No, we do have American

James:

anyone American listening to I apologize for this, but there is no fade failure. There is only feedback.

Jimmy:

The second area is organizationally and a lot of innovation is underpinned

James:

No, all innovation is underpinned by failure, I would argue. Yeah.

Jimmy:

that's, that's, that's true. I think we all have that relationship with failure, whether it's personally or professionally, sweep it under the carpet, pretend it doesn't happen. Actually, we just said it underpins your personal learning and it underpins innovation. And without those two things, you're a bit stuck.

James:

I have a teenage daughter just finished GCSEs And She reacts really badly, you know, she gets a test and she doesn't do well in the test. It's like the world's come around her head. But you're absolutely right, the whole point is to learn

Jimmy:

learn from it. But that's partly, I think, partly the reason why we have a negative perception and a negative relationship with failure is because from a very young age, as soon as you get into education, you are taught there is a right answer and there is a wrong answer. And that's how you're educated. You're educated. You're tested throughout your exams. Everything comes down to did you answer that question right or wrong? So I think that relationship, between right and wrong, success and failure really does join this people's view into into failure. And as a result, apart from sweeping under the carpet, we don't talk about it enough. So today we are going to talk about it a bit more, understanding a little bit. And look at some of the psychology behind it, and how we've experienced failure personally. What do you do about

James:

I know,

Jimmy:

I know, Yeah, I did, a little bit of research into the subject. one of the most well renowned things on talking about failure, there is. the work that Carol Dweck did and, the Ted Talk that she did on having a growth mindset.

James:

Huh.

Jimmy:

I mean, that's, you know, kind of go to for a lot of people.

James:

So what's that saying? I haven't seen that.

Jimmy:

So basically it's saying that

James:

I was too busy reading the book. Smart.

Jimmy:

such a smart ass. But basically it says that, having a growth mindset, so being open to change and growing and failure and learning is a huge stepping stone on improvement. And without failure, it's very hard to improve if you don't fail. Cause the, Point is, you're never going to be completely perfect all the time. But people with that fixed mindset, who view failure as a, you know, as a raw reflection on their ability, they don't learn from their mistakes. So even though they still make mistakes, they don't learn from them. So the research that she did really shows the importance of seeing failure as part of the learning process and the opportunity for growth.

James:

And I'm going to I am going to hash this now. However, isn't that the thing where you should never say to your kids, you're really clever. What you should say to your kids is, oh, you worked really hard. And Because if you say you're really clever, then they think that's a sort of innate capability. You can't get cleverer, whereas you can always work harder.

Jimmy:

It becomes absolute in that instance, doesn't it?

James:

But they did some work looking at it, and the kids that were told they were really clever, actually, Didn't try new things for fear of failing at

Jimmy:

Yeah, well if you're told you're really clever, you've done it a certain way and you get that reward, you just carry on doing it the same way, don't you?

James:

so that's quite

Jimmy:

develop the growth mindset.

James:

So quite limiting

Jimmy:

There's also a big piece of research around the emotional impact of failure and a lot of studies,

James:

Hang on i'm gonna enjoy this bit go on by who?

Jimmy:

Bowel meister.

James:

Baumeister, very good. But you can't spell that.

Jimmy:

written down in front of me. So the study done by B State, he looked at the. Emotional impact of failure and found that failure leads to feelings of shame, guilt and embarrassment. So as a result, we have a negativity bias towards If you think back to, your early career, often the things that went wrong sit more clearly with you than the things that went

James:

went well. Yeah, okay.

Jimmy:

And then, we touched on how failure supports innovation. Yeah. And actually there was some research done about organizational failure and success by Edmondson and. She looked at the psychological safety in organizations and found that where environments where failure was tolerated and it was seen as part of the innovation process, they're far more likely to succeed. Then organizations where you're not safe in terms of judgment and, we would have experienced this in terms of, performance where the downside of getting something wrong, you know, in terms of the consequence and I know you're itching to talk about performance management

James:

I'm not going to, but you know, I'm not well, we'll save that for another day, but no, you are absolutely right. And, well, we've all had bosses who jump up and down on your head when you do things wrong. And if they do that, you don't get things wrong. And the easiest way to not get something wrong is not to try anything new.

Jimmy:

If you think back to our days at Capital One, Which was a credit card organization that's big ethos was test and learn. And there was a lot of testing

James:

Yeah, there was a huge amount, yeah.

Jimmy:

but there was also a huge fear of failure and fear of doing things wrong and fear of being out of the ordinary. And the whole performance management processes that the organization had. really stifled a lot of difference, behaviors, diversity, all of those sorts of things.

James:

Yeah, and then when we're talking about it being cultural, human cultural, but actually organisational cultural, I think that's massive in this. But we'll come and talk about that in a bit.

Jimmy:

that a bit. Yeah. And the, the fear of failure has been studied extensively in psychology and so if you're afraid of failure, you will, absolutely reduce your efforts. So whilst you've got the situation I've just described where you want people to test and learn an innate part of testing and learning is failure. But at the same time, the culture is one that, that you would fear failure performance is going to drop as a result of that because people avoid. taking risks or taking on challenging stuff because they don't want to get things

James:

Oh, and they low ball it and they, yeah, yeah, yeah, seen lots of that.

Jimmy:

But I think the interesting thing is on all of that research, a lot of it will, chime with people, but intellectually we know the importance of trying things and failing and learning. But still, practically, we still shy away from it.

James:

Well, go on then. So what has that meant to you personally then? So what's your actual experience? It's alright to talk about research,

Jimmy:

yeah, no, so I think there's, a couple of things. personal failure and, organisational, organisational attitudes to failure. So if you look at personal failure,

James:

early

Jimmy:

early in my career, I made a mistake. I made a judgment call and I made a mistake at work and I was probably my very early twenties and I was demoted and I could have been, could have been sacked from that organization and that made me take a massive step back in my career. So, I had a really, not a rough time in my early twenties, but in terms of my career, I got demoted and I went off and tried something new. I was on a successful.

James:

Yeah.

Jimmy:

I wanted to try something new. So I went off in my early twenties to try and be a pop star. Now, this strategy,

James:

got any musical ability?

Jimmy:

well, this, this strategy had a slight flaw in it.

James:

it. Which was you don't have any

Jimmy:

Absolutely. I couldn't sing, couldn't dance, couldn't play any musical instruments, have absolutely zero musical talent. So, between a combination of my lack of musical talent,, and getting demoted for making a mistake, my career took some really big

James:

I'd have been okay at that you know, mate. Because I am a wild dancer.

Jimmy:

you are a lot of things, in reality sometimes they're slightly different. There's a difference between fear of failure and delusion. So to me, failure, feels horrible at the time, found it really difficult at the time. I felt like I'd let everyone down by not making a go of something and everyone had faith in me and I made this mistake, but actually I faced into both of those situations. I dealt with them, I learned from them. And then in my later career, it really helped me. So I think there's a bit about personal failure. And then the second bit is. organizationally. And I definitely in my early career was caught up in that everything's got to be perfect. You've got to get everything right all the time. And then I learned and realized actually that's not

James:

Yeah.

Jimmy:

But It's amazing how many organizations try and get stuff right first time. I worked with an organization who were dealing with 100 years worth of claims And they were going to do it all via technology. Yet, they didn't really test it in the right way to see if it would work. When they switched it on, it didn't work. So, funny enough,

James:

Why didn't they test

Jimmy:

Because I think that people sometimes take Well, a very optimistic view of things, so it'll all be alright. I've seen lots of organisations go live with stuff that wasn't fit to go live with, or they get caught up in the we've got to have this live on this time and this date and, you choose time over quality.

James:

Yeah, it reminds me the whole TSB debacle when the banking system fell over and then everybody knew the thing was going to fall over, but nobody was prepared to tell the senior executive that it was going to fall over. And it's the whole fear of failure and the psychological safety thing.

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Jimmy:

How about you James? What's your relationship been with

James:

Now, mine is more, I suppose more of a systematic than a personal view. I thirty, you know, thirty five years ago, I studied, I got a degree in genetics. But genetics is all about evolution. And evolution is all about trying lots of small things and seeing what works. Yes, evolution is all about failure. And you learn that, but that was part of my education, part of my mindset, because I had it banged into me so often.

Jimmy:

And, and in fairness, you know, I'd say that the, the generalizations we were making at the top, which is you have it banged into you in education that there's a right and a wrong, success and failure, are two polar opposite, one's good and one bad. Which then sets you up to not embrace that through your life. And I guess your point of coming up through that studying evolution, that definitely helped you because, you know, your attitude when when we worked together towards trying stuff out and experimentation was quite different from a lot of other

James:

a lot of people. And then my first proper job, I was a development manager. And that's all about research and development. It's all about trying things. And so we I mean, you'd laugh, but we used to make, a load of chicken curry or whatever it is, but what you do is you'd start off with a new recipe in the kitchen and see if that works. And if that works, you move up to a pilot plan. And if that works, you move up to a line trial and you're gradually understanding what works and what doesn't. And by doing that, you gradually reduce risk and scale up. it was a bit of a shock for me moving from that environment moving to work for a bank and an insurance company because their failure was much more frowned upon. So you're right I am, I've always viewed it slightly differently but it probably because like I said of that education and my first ten years at work. But I don't think organizations on the whole realize how important it is. There's that thing you said the other day, was if you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got. So yeah, the only way to improve performance is to try something different, i. e. learn, see what happens if you do something different., what a lot of people aren't prepared to face into the fact is that our workplaces are so complex that you can't possibly understand what's going to happen. So you've got to test your way in, and by definition, testing means failure. Because if you haven't got any failure, you haven't got any learning, and if you haven't got any learning, you haven't got any improvement. So it just is critical.

Jimmy:

life as if it's a linear

James:

Yeah.

Jimmy:

You have to keep learning. I saw a really interesting interview of Lewis Hamilton recently, and he's probably the greatest motor racing driver of all time, but he said he learns constantly and that's been his edge, is that throughout his career, no matter how he's good, he's got, he's always believed that he could. Learn more.

James:

Well, I'll take that. Another motor racing example is a lovely quote from Mario Andretti and he said once, if you're not scared, then you're not driving fast enough. But that's the point, you've got to be trying new things if you really want to succeed.

Jimmy:

And whilst we're on the quotes,

James:

Oh go on, you've got another one.

Jimmy:

I'll see your

James:

You take my, and you raise me, go on.

Jimmy:

Kipling

James:

Oh, okay.

Jimmy:

If you can meet success and failure and treat them both as impostors, then you are a balanced man, my son. The point being, we don't, as people, treat success and failure in, equal balance. So, another recent example, though, is this podcast. We want to grow this podcast, right? To share some of the material, some of the content, and we've been trying lots of stuff. So we're constantly coming up with new ideas, researching stuff, learning stuff, trying

James:

See what works. Some Ha ha ha. A lot of it doesn't work. Yeah. Yeah, but you don't know which bits are going to until you try it.

Jimmy:

And, and, it will grow when we keep finding the individual things. But one of the things that we've talked about is, getting more feedback from our audience. And we get quite a bit of feedback. People often reach out, tell us what they like, what they don't like, what works well, ask us questions, ask for help. And that is invaluable because it allows us to learn. Now that doesn't mean everything we can do is perfect, but getting that

James:

to learn. Now that doesn't mean that everything we is perfect,

Jimmy:

yeah, Which

James:

getting

Jimmy:

Yes. Right?

James:

What is that all about? So the first thing is, you know, see something, have a plan, decide you want something that doesn't quite look right create a plan. how are you going to test something? Yeah. Then you run a test, you do the do, but then the most important thing is the check. So get the feedback. See, well, did that work the way I expected it to work or not? And if it did, then you go one way. And if it didn't, you go the other way, which is the act bits. But the most important bit of that really is the checking, getting the feedback and understanding.

Jimmy:

Yeah. Because back to. Our podcast, unless we get feedback on what's working and what's not. And that can be people telling us, or it can be seeing the downloads improve. You don't really know. But organizations often just do the first bit, plan, do,

James:

Yeah, plan, do, plan, do, plan, do, plan, do, plan, do.

Jimmy:

so I think organizationally, know, thinking a bit more broadly about, you know, Have you got, back to the research, the psychological safety for people to,, check back and then adjust their course of action?

James:

There's an interesting thing here, right? Because on the one hand you say, well what does that mean? Does that mean that you should be rewarding failures?

Jimmy:

Yeah.

James:

But there's a really difficult cultural bit in here, right? Because most organizations, they'll reward success. If somebody does something good, you know, you get a slap on the back and a bonus.

Jimmy:

Yeah.

James:

But actually, rewarding success is a fool's error. Because if you reward success, then people won't try stuff. But then that gets you to a point where you're saying, well, should you be rewarding failure then?

Jimmy:

And should you?

James:

Well, you try to get that past your HR director, right? So no, you shouldn't be rewarding failure. So then, all right, so you can't reward success and you can't reward failure. What the hell should you do? There's a guy called Bob Sutton and his recommendation, which is really quite cute, is what you should do is you should reward the number of tests and trials because the more people test and try things, the more likely they are to be successful and they'll get some Failures and they'll get some successes, but the key determinant actually is how many different things you tried So there's a thought for you reward tests

Jimmy:

And I think the the other thing about tests is, as you bang on about, it's being really clear on how you structure your tests within your organization. So don't just. You know. To the point I was making earlier, let's just do a test and then

James:

throw something at the wall and keep going. Yeah. Yeah

Jimmy:

It's how you clear on your hypothesis? How do you clear on how you measure the text? What success looks like? How do you compare it? How do you not just, you know, because I want this to be the right answer. Therefore, I'm going to go live with this. It's how do you not let that optimism creep in and actually really structure your test and learn correctly.

James:

Yeah.

Jimmy:

And I've got a great example of, not organizationally, but personally, where I haven't done that. I take so many vitamins and supplements. I must rattle, right?

James:

You look great on it though, he's positively glowing in front of me. Do you remember those Ready Breck adverts in the 1980s?

Jimmy:

Benjamin Button,

James:

okay.

Jimmy:

Do I know which one of the 11 supplements works? I have not got the first clue because I keep taking them, not testing them, not learning. So I just pile on and pile on and pile on and that's what organizations do. And so funny enough I can't tell which supplements work. A lot of time organizations can't tell you what levers they're pulling and what the result is of

James:

Well, absolutely, and then you get things baked into the way we do business, which are just madness. Nobody's got any idea if they're working at all or not. But it just becomes organizational waste.

Jimmy:

Yeah. I, I heard another really great quote as well, which I think you'll like a lot of organizations, out of Silicon Valley do embrace failure really well. And they do have cultures where failure and innovation and learning are well embraced and well accepted. But one of the things they talk about is failing fast. So when you're going to test something. Don't just keep flogging it and flogging it there's a, a Japanese saying, if you get on the wrong train, get off at the nearest station. The longer it takes you to get off, the more expensive the return trip will be. So don't spend a load of time on it, even though you want it to be the right answer, just accept it's not learn from it. Change tact.

James:

Yeah, but we all fall into it. I did a piece of work. Once we ran out of program, and I couldn't prove it was working. And so I had this analyst who used to work for me, a chap called Pete. If you're listening, Pete, hello, Pete. And Pete, Pete was very capable guy, right? You know, he cut it this way, he cut it that way. He did this regression, he did that regression, random forest, the whole nine yards, everything he could look at it. And eventually he came to me and he said, James, at what point are we going to admit this isn't working? But there's the point. You get tied into these things. If you can't admit they're not working, then you won't stop them. And then you just keep going down that rabbit hole.

Jimmy:

So we've shared, some of the research to do with, with failure and the fear of failure. We've shared some of our personal perspectives. We've shared some of the things that you can do personally around how you think about failure, how you embrace it, and organizationally, some of the things that you can do. So where does that take us?

James:

I think the first thing really is you have to be able to sort of unlock that tension between what you know to be right and what you feel, what you believe, because it's only when you can get over the emotional resistance to failure that you'll start to have a go, try new things.

Jimmy:

And ultimately, failure does underpin learning, innovation, improvement. So it's a pretty important thing to get to grips

James:

And as I said, when I was a development manager, development being improvement, you ran tests. It was just inherent to it. So that's what you need to do. I think the final thing for me is just if you want to go and learn more, there's loads on the internet. You can look at, go and look at the Carol Dweck Ted talk. Easy for me to say. And also the other thing you really ought to do is Google Deming and look at the learning cycle because it's a bit 1980s, but it really explained what you need to be thinking about.

Jimmy:

to be thinking about. So we have shared some of our insights, how personally and professionally we've really embraced the power of failure. So hopefully you found that useful. If you would like to discuss failure, or if you want to give us more feedback on

James:

which would be very

Jimmy:

podcast, which helps us in our learning journey as podcasters, then please feel free to get in touch.

James:

With me Thank you very much for your time.

Jimmy:

for

James:

Speak to you later.

We cover a whole host of topics on this podcast from purpose to corporate jargon, but always focused on one thing, getting the job done well, easier said than done. So if you've got. Unhappy customers or employees, bosses or regulators breathing down your neck. If your backlogs are out of control and your costs are spiraling and that big IT transformation project that you've been promised just keeps failing to deliver, we can help if you need to improve your performance, your team's performance, or your organizations. Get in touch at Jimmy at jobdonewell. com or James at jobdonewell. com.

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James Lawther

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Jimmy Barber

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