Agile Driven Impact
Hosts Diane & Erich Leonard discuss Agile "plays" for changemakers. Learn how to steer your mission, build resilience, and drive meaningful impact.
Agile Driven Impact
Co-Pilot with Rob Hatch - Reframe Your Retrospective: Focus More on Learning from Success
In this Co-pilot episode of Agile Driven Impact, hosts Diane and Erich are joined by Rob Hatch — executive coach, trusted advisor to CEOs and senior leaders, and author of Attention! and Success Frames — to challenge one of the most deeply held assumptions in continuous improvement: that we learn best from failure.
Rob makes the case that what teams actually need is a deliberate practice of examining what went right — the specific decisions, behaviors, and conditions that drove results. Without that, teams dismiss their wins as "just doing the job" and miss the patterns that would make success repeatable.
In this conversation, Rob breaks down what a Success Frame is, how to build one, and how Agile teams can bring that lens to their retrospectives — shifting from failure analysis to something more energizing and more useful.
If your retros spend more time on what went wrong than what to protect, this episode is for you.
Evolving your work, accelerating your impact
Hey, welcome to Agile Driven Impact and this co-pilot episode. We're super excited to have Rob Hatch with us today. He is a professional coach and well, just an amazing published author. And I'm super excited about today's episode.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation we had with Rob. He's really makes you rethink how to look at success and not so much learning from failure, but learning from success. And to me, it gave some eye-opening insights on ways that I could change the way that I reflect on my work and my teams and in any organizations I work with. I got a lot out of it. I learned a lot myself. So I think you will too.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And you'll want to read all those books afterwards, uh, guaranteed on that one. So uh stick around, check it out. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Agile Driven Impact. Here we are today in a co-pilot episode, which uh, if you don't know, means that we have someone joining us in the car hanging out with us. Uh and today, Rob Hatch is joining us to share some thoughts and expertise with us. Uh full disclosure, we've known Rob for a really long time.
SPEAKER_03Oh, you've known.
SPEAKER_00Okay, I've known Rob for Hobbs.
SPEAKER_03I've just read his books and heard about him for a long time.
SPEAKER_00That's true. You've heard about him for a long time. I've had the pleasure of working with Rob. Uh, he's an executive coach and does an amazing job helping organizations navigate dynamics and challenges and changes and decisions that just don't always have like a clear path forward. Rob asks really thoughtful, challenging questions, is what I'm gonna say. I've benefited from them. And one of the things that Rob and I have always debated about is that he doesn't use the word agile, but Rob's work, I believe, is agile through and through. So we're not gonna have that debate today, but that's the context, as I tell you, that Rob is a two-time international best-selling author. He wrote Attention in 2021, and he wrote Success Frames in 2024. Actually, I should also talk about Stay Focused, right? That was the latest one published in 25. Yeah. Yeah. So prolific author, and we're so happy to have you here today, Rob. Thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_02Well, thank you so much for having me. And the fact that we get to sort of copilot this is nice. I'm not gonna be asked to sing or anything, right? We're not gonna do any sort of our karaoke later.
SPEAKER_00Later. Those will be our outfit.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. But I I mean, I knew you before the books, and then reading the books and in your hearing your voice in your words in that way. Um I I love referencing them, but our listeners might not be as familiar. So could you just give us like what's the quick overview of success frames and attention? Or attention and success frames? Your choice on order.
SPEAKER_02I'll start with attention because it was the first one. And uh I wrote attention as a means of helping people to reclaim the time and attention and attention that's being well, you know, literally stolen from us, I think, in some ways, and we don't even realize it's happening, you know. Uh at the time uh sort of when it came out, uh, there began a lot more conversation about the impact of of social media uh and and what that was doing to our brains and how it was uh you know keeping us from what it is that we wanted to focus on. And so over the years I had developed a number of techniques and tricks and things that worked for me to stay focused to to uh to block it out, to be able to choose what it was that I wanted to focus on and not be at the whims of uh of of other people's uh agendas, basically. So uh attention is really about sharing some of those tools and and the why behind it as well. And then Success Frames is uh not disconnected, but one of the things that I've always believed is that in my in my gut was that failure was not a great teacher for me. Uh that I don't operate really well from a position of uh of being put in a corner. I can fight my way out, but that's not sustainable. And and what I really felt like where I felt the lessons came was when I finally succeeded in getting past that failure point, when I finally came back, how I achieved that. And then I started to to find some research that supported that. So that's sort of the germ of that is I like to look at and reflect on what worked far more than I like to look at uh my failures. But more than that, the lessons that come from figuring out why something worked and how you did what you did are far more important than just don't do that thing again uh when you fail.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's fantastic. Um, there's so many places I could go with that that description too, um, in in our work and kind of what what you think about. So, you know, your argument in that book is that learning from failure leaves us with a list of what we should avoid rather than a way forward, right? So uh in Agile, our teams often do what's called a retrospective, right? So they look back and oftentimes they focus on the failures, right? What went wrong is where they get their improvements from. Um, what are the real costs of that failure first orientation? What do you what do you think on that?
SPEAKER_02I I think again, I think the the cost is that we end up giving more of the time to examining a failure when we're when there are so many things, it doesn't give us much to build on. Again, I think you're just identifying what what not to do and and saying, well, I don't want to do that again. Uh the lesson is really gonna come after you've succeeded, and then you reflect on that process, and then you have this framework for you know, it's not exactly you, you you're not gonna apply it every single time in the exact same way, but the framework, the components of it, what what were the conditions that made us successful? What were the set of operations that we that made us successful? And and what are the actions that we took? How did we approach it? And so those operations, the conditions, the approach or actions, I think that is so much juice there. So the cost I think is that it's time and and dwelling on it. There's another cost too in examining failure. Um, one of the reasons that it doesn't stick is because uh we it's an ego threat, right? No matter how much we want to say, you know, we learn from we learn people say we learn best from from failure or we think we know that it's a good thing, we don't like to sit there in our failure for too long. It just doesn't feel good.
SPEAKER_03Sure.
SPEAKER_02So I think there's a there's a cost there as well. And when you start working with a team, just no matter what the culture's like, I think it's still really hard to avoid that ego threat.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's right. I really like that actually, because you know, in many environments, cultures, and organizations, they're afraid of failure. Um, so trying to get people to learn from failure is a difficult thing. So if if we get them to learn from iterating on success, right, and making small incremental improvements and then learning from it. So what I take away from this for people that might listen to this podcast is you know, focus more in your retrospectives and things like that on the last improvement you made and how did it work? Why did it work? Could we make a similar improvement in the future? I really like that. Um, I have a curious question though that maybe you could answer since you looked at this a lot in the research and stuff. Is the pull towards analyzing failure just human nature, or is it something that organizations and processes actually reinforce? Where does this pattern come from?
SPEAKER_02I I it's a great question. I don't know that I have a you know sort of well grounded answer in terms of research, though I'm gonna say that I think part of it is this acceptance that failure is the best teacher. It's not, and again, it's not that there aren't lessons to be learned. I don't want to say, you know, you should never talk about it or be afraid of it. In fact, I think failing over and over again gets you, can can get you there. Um it's just that I don't want to spend too much time examining it. But that idea has become so pervasive that that's where the lesson lies that I I think we haven't questioned it. And that's what the intention of the book was was to question that a little bit. And and the I think the intention of the research that I ended up finding that maybe we ought to rethink this just a little bit and spend at least as much time in those retrospectives on success as we do failure. I'm not saying avoid it, you shouldn't talk about it or anything like that, but be mindful of where you're putting your energy and what's how valuable really is the examination and the feedback that you're getting in the end.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I I I love that. And I think to transition to sort of some next questions we have, I just one takeaway that I'm hearing or feeling out of that is how how we frame success will matter. And I think you've got some questions on that that we're gonna ask today because you know, success doesn't mean I think getting everything right, it means getting something, getting somewhere, and sometimes failure can even be part of the success. But I think you have a few curious questions you want to ask about this area.
SPEAKER_00Well, but I was just thinking back about what you said for how it's ingrained, and I'm thinking how many different memes or reels or bumper stickers, like all the failure fail fast, fail fast, like all forward, fail, whatever. Yeah, like those have to be like are those nails on a chalkboard for you, Rob? Is that like please?
SPEAKER_02That's yes, it is, especially with uh you know influencers who who who love to sort of tout that uh, you know, it it's huge in in the fitness community as well, around you know, uh learning from failure or but I you know if if you really examine how like even elite athletes practice, they're trying to get the success so ingrained that it it's like they don't even think about it. You don't think about that connection. Yeah, I love that really is uh, you know, I I mean I hate to use an overuse like you know Tom Brady-esque thing, and I know you guys are not necessarily Patriots fans or anything, but uh um but the the repetition in practice over and over and over again, it in many ways he didn't have to think anymore. So there's a little bit of stuff from attention in there that you know that I talked about because I believe I referenced him uh a little bit in there about not making, you know, not having to make the decision and and kind of removing that decision because it's just so automatic. But what he's trying to do is replicate success. And he knows that if I do that this way, more often than not I will succeed. Not every time someone's gonna come out of nowhere and hang interceptable or something, but yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um maybe about a little bit about them and intercepted. Yeah, I I use the similar one that came from Effortless, which is a book by Greg McAllen, which talks about uh Michael Phelps' routine, right? And winning the race is just another success in his routine, right? So he does all these steps and every one of those is successful. So then so I think that's a really interesting thing that teams or individuals can take away from this is you know, I love the put success in your way, I still use it, right? I, you know, to work out in the morning, I make sure my workout clothes are next to my bed, I make sure that I've got a water bottle next to my bed, like stuff like that. So you just get up and it's just part of winning in the morning. I love that. And I think that if teams were looking at just these small incremental successes that they can do every sprint, every week, and then learning from those, like, hey, we did this and it really made us feel good. What if we did this every day? What if we did this every meeting? Well, those types of things. I like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, so Eric just walked us right into like what might a success frame look like. You kind of gave a little peek into one of Rob's stories. And uh, so let's talk about what is a success frame? How some how could someone build one? What does that mean when you're trying to help someone understand? Because it's I know you've helped our team to think about it, and it's not their natural go-to. So give us a high-level explanation. What is a success frame? How would somebody build one?
SPEAKER_02So a success frame is basically uh a result of reflective practice. When you stop and ask, what made that thing work? Um, so you used, you know, just the example of putting success in your way in the morning and having it, once you've figured out that that was helpful, your brain, I think, my brain at least, starts to think, well, where else can I use this? Where else can I be ready? Where else can I have everything I need ready? Because if I reflect on what made getting out the door and doing my exercise easy, that you know, that small success, that that that little win. So I want to think about what what were the conditions that I set up? What were the what's the set of operations that I go through to prepare the night before? And what are the actions I need to take? How how do I want to approach this? When you're so the idea is to take a win and deconstruct it and figure out what it yeah, what are those conditions, what are the what are the operations and and what was my approach? How did it, you know, why did that work for me? And take that, you know, framework and start to think, where else can I apply this or how can I apply it again? Um, preparation is just one of those like it it seems so simple and obvious, but the number of times I have to remind myself that when I go into a situation really well prepared, and then I think back, okay, what helps me to be prepared? What are the what's the set of what's the success frame for preparation for me?
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_02I have that. And so I when I know I go through that process, I enter prepared, I'm in a situation and I feel you know so much more confident.
SPEAKER_00And I know going back to what Eric said about retrospectives as an agile event that many teams go through, they're often answering the questions, what went well, but then they quickly go to what didn't go as planned, what didn't go as well. And that's where the improvements come from. And I remember the time that you were with our team and you went through the questions you just asked them. Like, and they sort are like, wait, what are you asking? Right? Like this is so it was so different to think about what were those conditions, then tell me what didn't go well. Said you broke down, like I think about that very basic retrospective structure, like just basic columns. You took what went well and asked this whole spider web of questions that made them think about why did they go well? What could be repeatable patterns that they could find? And so, you know, same conversation, like an analyzing actions that a teams happened. Um, the thing that from the that conversation when you coached my team, one of the things that they still say all the time, they'll reference you and like, okay, so I was thinking about Rob, and I thought, what can today, Beth, do to help tomorrow, Beth? And right based on what can tonight Rob do to and that was like your workout story, but that idea that if they know their conditions that are making them successful, they can think about how to make themselves successful together. So when we think about how you're using success frames, how teams are using that idea, finding strengths, thinking about decisions. Um there's one thing to say, like, hey, we were real, I'm a really good, whatever, I'm a really good baseball player, I'm a really good runner, I'm a really good writer. So you can be innately good at something versus like, hey, this is something where like we were successful together or successful as an individual. Like, what's the difference between skill and talent and like conditions?
SPEAKER_02So I think skill and talent is um it's a great, first of all, it's a great question. And I I actually I'm gonna pause and go back to just that retrospective story for a second, in the sense that I want to hit this point of how quickly we go from so what went well, and we'll list off like this went well, and this one well, this went well, and then we go so quickly into the what went well. Yeah, immediately the laundry list comes out so easy, but it really is catching yourself in that moment of retrospective retrospection and reflection to say, all right, why did it go well? Just even that one question, what made it go well? What did you do? What you know, what were the conditions? That's powerful. Um the butt I think it's remembering the process that you go through or anchoring yourself in your process and understanding that you might be good at something, but you also can work really hard at it. And and on a very simple sort of parenting example, um, you know, if my child comes home with a report card and let's say one of the, you know, one of the grades is really bad, um my inclination is to say first, you know, might might be to say, what happened? But a success frame of that would be like, how did you get four A's and you know, how did you get these four A's? Like, how did you do that in Spanish and chemistry and whatever else? How did you get those A's? Because the lesson to to pull that C up is probably in how you got the A's more than it is in the what went wrong in the C's. And they might they might join up. So I they might say things like, Well, it's just an easier class, or I I'm just I'm just really good at that. So they they default to being skilled or smart or it came easy. But actually when you push a little harder, they they studied, you know, so so you studied a lot more for that. It wasn't maybe it was an enjoyable class to you. Um, so the conditions uh become a little different, the operations become a little different, the actions become different. You put more time into that. Oh, so more time. You know, so you start to build this little framework through reflection based on the what they actually did versus blowing past the, well, I'm just smarter or more skilled at that. Um, because I think the two have to go hand in hand.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I really like that example. And I know given your background leading like a childcare nonprofit, you've got a lot of examples that come from that space of working with children and or as a parent. And I think it also helps to remind us that this is something that's ingrained in us as we grow, that some of our approaches to success versus failure, some of it to Eric's point, like it's workplace structure and how we're being rewarded. But it it's something that a lot of us have grown up with. And so there's a lot of learning that comes, or relearning, I should say, unlearning, maybe. Unlearning, yeah. In order to flip the script, yeah, right.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, even from childhood, which is really interesting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um, maybe just shift shifting a little bit, um, you know, speaking about your first book, Attention. Um, you know, I I really love that book. And one of the things that I was thinking about is in the business world, uh, we often try to maximize resource utilization, which I think is uh the wrong thing to maximize, right? Uh it's like filling a highway up with cars and hoping that it moves, right? Uh, instead of flow efficiency and flowing work and learning as we go and things like this. Yeah. Um, how do you see the connection between managing our attention or in business terms, the resource utilization of, hey, I'm busy doing everything, um, and not being able to pay attention to actually being able to learn from success? Like, how do those two connect to each other and what do we do about that?
SPEAKER_02I think in the first way I'm going to approach this is attention for an individual and attention looking at it from the a team perspective and thinking about the fact that we often put a lot of personal responsibility on individual productivity. And we don't often think about team productivity. So when you were talking about, you know, when we move to an environment, you're just sort of thinking everyone's got to do their own thing to get, you know, to show up, to do the right thing. But the culture of how we communicate inside an organization, um, how the expectations for always being on or notifications being on, uh, and and how the response time we don't think about what our impact is on the individual and on the team. So I I I did a um I did a survey a couple of years ago, but also I did uh an internal assessment with a group of managers and managers and supervisors and the people that they supervise. And just to kind of gauge that impact of when you make a request. You know, do you feel like you know who you know, know what what's on that person's plate? You know, you you're right, yeah, asking them to do something, but you don't know that they're already working on 10 things, but you just keep lobbing things over. Yep. So the way that you frame the request has to be thought out. Did you just send you know a message on Teams or Slack? Did you send an email? What's the appropriate channel for that? So resource utilization, like which resource is the right resource to make this request, or which channel is the right place to make this request? And then how much attention do we expect people to be devoting to paying attention to all of the communication channels that are open and all the information that's coming at us? And how can we narrow that for them? So attention in terms of what I do as an individual and turning off my notifications and trying to check my email when I have the time to check my email and not being at the dis you know at um you know, be being at someone else's disposal all the time. And to moving that into an organization or a team culture and thinking about all right, how do we communicate? Like, do we really want someone constantly monitoring this team's channel for lots of notifications when the notification isn't even meant for them?
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02You know, because they're constantly going, oh, oh, that's not for me. Oh, that's not for me. Oh, right, you know, yeah, it happens a lot.
SPEAKER_00Well, there's a study that I know you recently put in your newsletter about how often in your survey that people were being interrupted. And I can't remember the the stat off the top of my head. Maybe you can.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00You're kind of talking about a team that learned from it, took a while for them to take your uh attention advice to heart. Right? Maybe it might be have been my team, but you know, what's that data point again?
SPEAKER_02Six six there were two data points in there. Sixty percent of people reported spending more more than twenty-five percent of their day reacting to notifications on channels like Slack and Teams and things like that. So 60% of employees, and this is a this is a survey of about 180 people. Um so 25% of their day just checking it, and the key thing for me was even if it's just to see whether or not the message is meant for them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And then the other stat was that um 25% of the people reported spending more than half of their day doing the same thing. So again, just in that idea of like just to see, wait, is that for no, it's not for me. Is that for me? No, it's not for me.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's interesting because um one of the things that I like to emphasize with our team is uh using something like a kanban of the actual stuff that matters and opening that first in the morning, right? Look at the work that you've committed to that's important before you open your email. Go try and work on one of those things first. The email can wait, the team's message can wait, right? The response time needed, if they really need to get a hold of you, they're gonna contact you in different ways, right? So I think that's important. And I think as we try to learn from success too, uh, one thing that I like to think about, or or or maybe you've seen in your experiences if someone or some team in your organization is having success, uh, might it also be good for the organization to learn from that and then share that learning with teams that aren't as successful?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. I mean, that uh goes to to uh one of my favorite books of all time, which is Chip and Dan Heath's Switch book, where they talk about focusing on the bright spots. So the a lot of the success lessons are already there within the organization. Someone has got a great method. And it's not that and I really want to be careful with this. Um, I'm I'm I don't think that everyone has to follow the exact routine, but the concept that you were just talking about of whatever however best your priorities are served up to you, whether it's compound style or some other method, the idea is focus on priorities before communication. Um so, and if there's someone in the organization who has got that figured out, you can try their method for a little while. But if you have to tweak it and make it your own and say, oh, that doesn't quite work for me, don't give up on you know trying to figure that out or following the basic idea of it, find the way that works for you to get that stuff served up. Like put put success in your way, going back to you know, someone else might need to sleep in their running clothes rather than just have them laid out, right? Like that's their version of it.
SPEAKER_03Um but the idea of starting from a standard, I like that, right? So if somebody has a standard that worked for them, start there. Yes, then then iterate on that, make it a little bit better, and then if you make it better and it works better for you, maybe share that back with the people who shared the standard with you in the first place, because maybe it might even work better for them to change theirs just a little bit, right? I think those are some things that I'm taking away from what you're saying.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and then you get the sort of collaborative uh like culture that that gets built, you get these sort of standards uh that the team might start to share and build on, it becomes part of uh institutional knowledge and a reference point for hey, this is we've all found that some version of this really, really works. No, that's fantastic.
SPEAKER_00Because I think a success frame, now that I've got multiple versions of how we're gonna get out the door for running, right? But the way that we're thinking about success frames, it it feels really personal, like what works for you, but then when we come to the workplace, so how do we make team-level success frames? So it's one thing to say, like, here's how I might approach my launch to my day versus how Eric might versus how Rob might. We all have different ways that we could say, yeah, we want to think about priorities first. But what does it look like when you try to scale like an individual success frame? How do you make one so that it's full team-based, that it is taking individual nuances into account? What does that look like?
SPEAKER_02I think the the the way that it works is taking the intention behind the action, like the set, you know, putting as Eric was describing, uh email and teams communication is not a priority. So being able to state that, right, like your work is it the work that is a priority for you and what you've been tasked with, that is the most important thing. It is not important for you to read your email first or um check teams or have any of that communication. So you're giving permission. You start to give permission around broad strokes about how communication works and being intentional about if someone needs you, here's how they send up the bat signal, um, you know, and and and how they can can can reach you if they really needed to. Um so I think it's partly about being intentional, but stating what the overall goal is. We want you to be able to have the time and and energy and the focus to do your work. We're gonna do our best to sort of limit the distractions. And then you start to share some of those successes that other people might have had. You can approach it this way, you can approach it that way. But overall, we want we have a culture where deep work is more important than constant interaction. Now, there's some roles that require people to be constantly monitoring communication. So, you know, I want to caveat that a little bit, but in in terms of what we're talking about, people are getting a project or a task and move going away and working on it. And I think being able to say within an organization that that's important time, that's how you begin to to scale it, I think, is to start talking about openly uh how communication happens and works and how what's the expectation for uh responding to communication is it I I I had another client I was working with and I was training all of their the supervisors and they ever without question believed that any email coming from the senior director required their immediate attention. No one ever said that, right? She never said that in in her communication, but they would drop everything and jump into whatever the request was. Now, she could have been subtly implying that she wants quick responses, but it's on her to examine all right, I didn't realize the impact of what I was, you know, sure. I have to think a little bit about hearing that and and and the impact of her communication, but we don't understand how those power structures work. Someone might be genuinely afraid of their job, and so it's not safe to even question it, you just jump in and take care of it. Yeah, there's a cost to that switch, and so we had to kind of work through and and get really clear on the communication styles and uh and what's expected, whether it's an email or Teams or wherever it's coming from.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think that's helpful to hear about some of the different types of questions and concerns that teams have as they're trying different success frames. There's lots of dynamics at play, leadership structure, team cultures for organizational culture outside of just the team. So we talk a lot about both team level, leader level, right? We've got a wide range of folks within the hierarchy that are listeners for us. So I think, Eric, you had a question that was going to help people think about uh what their role is in this type of discussion, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think um, you know, what is the biggest mistake? You know, what's a common pitfall we have, a big mistake that you see leaders and teams make um when they first try to shift from doing failure analysis to go to a success analysis frame?
SPEAKER_02Uh over like uh almost like over praising or or making it like you know, thinking it's it's fluffy and and it's just about you know congratulating people that there's there's meat to it. There's there's actual stuff that we want to pull out that can inform how we operate. It can change the whole dynamic of how an operate uh how an organization or a team functions. Um and and we we do it, it's so it's so common. Uh you know, there are people who we just sort of point to in like you know, uh in a construction company, for example, there's a you know there might be a guy who is so experienced he can just walk in and assess a situation like that, but no one's taking the time to ask him, how do you do that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_02You were talking about finding that person who does something so well, deconstructing how he does it, uh, and and thinking about you know what what is it you look for when you're walking in? What are the what are the things that you see immediately? Uh and trying to get some that's like deep institutional knowledge. That person retires, that's all gone, team back with just their own experience, maybe some time with that person, but the richness in success that I think we overlook and we we pass it off as just being congratulatory and um and just boosting people up and lifting people up. It does that as well, but it's sure.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I love that as a as a pitfall to point out because I I know in our organizations uh that we work with, it's they try to you know celebrate success, but that's the end of it. Just celebrate it. Who did it? What did they do? Cool. It never goes deeper than that. It doesn't go into well, how did they do it? What did they do differently than other groups? Why were they why are we why are we congratulating them? We're congratulating them because they achieved this, but actually we should be congratulating them because they used a process that got them right, and I think that's really powerful.
SPEAKER_00But hold on, you're making one assumption. I gotta like hop in here. I'm like, that teams are celebrating. So I think actually, as you say that, I'm like, wait, wait, wait. One of the things that we find in a lot of the nonprofits that we work with is that they're just so busy doing that they forget to celebrate. Right. So if they forget to celebrate because they saw something that's successful, like well, I'm wondering, I'm like, whoops, then what how are you gonna learn to make a success frame? Because you're stuck in like either do mode or uh-oh, don't do that again mode.
SPEAKER_02Right. And you're organizations that do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And and there's there's something great about organizations that do, right? I mean, but but you're pointing to the fact that there are also tremendous pitfalls, there's a lot of burnout when people don't stop and reflect at all about the work and how they do it and why they do it, and you know, what choices they made along the way. Uh, even yeah, thinking about uh back in in my days of working in the child health center, when we were training on reflective practice, we would talk about an interaction between, say, a provider and a parent. And we would ask questions like, so, you know, what did you say? You know, and they would talk about what they said and like, okay, so how did they respond? Was that different than how you expected them to respond? So we're bringing it down to this individual level where they begin to develop this ability to start to notice nuances in a conversation. Like, I said this with this intention, but it seemed to shut them down. All right, so what did you do next? Like, did you did they completely shut down for the rest of the time you were with them, or did you say something that helped to reopen them back up? Well, yeah, actually, I started just talking about their child, and they opened back up and it just became so easy again. Oh, great. So now whenever you feel like things are a little stuck, you want to remember to, and this is a touch points uh principle, um, use the child's behavior as your language. Start talking about their child. Who doesn't want to talk about their child? Who can't make a connection? So when when you're stuck, you would go to the child. So those that's a like really um intricate reflective practice session. But that's what you can get is that it that becomes this tool, part of a framework that you can use down the road to draw from and say, oh, right, I'm stuck. Child, focus on the child.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, triggered.
SPEAKER_00Well, and so we've given a bunch of different analogies and examples just in our conversation today. And the thing that we're always focused on here is we think about what an episode's gonna end on, is we always want to have some like a challenge, uh, something that we're encouraging folks to try. And you know me, I like to try one thing and see what works, right? Good, bad, learn from it. Okay, so it's sort of that same idea. If you're thinking of an individual, whether they're formally using Agile or not, regardless of their spot in the organization, they're trying to think about one thing they want to try that's related to success frames, some way to shift their focus for their team towards success. What would be something, knowing everybody's unique, I get it, but what would be something that you would issue as like a recommendation or a challenge for them to try shifting their focus?
SPEAKER_02I would start with the question, why did that go well when you're in a retrospective, for example, or some conversation where you recognize, all right, so what went well in this project? Oh, this went well, this went well. Stop and just ask, why do you why do we think that went well? There are other questions to ask after that, obviously, about the conditions and the operations and and and the actions, but just stopping to ask why we think it went well is the that's the very first step. So asking, I would go right there and just ask why. Stop and ask why it went well.
SPEAKER_03How many you said this week?
SPEAKER_00Oh, I was like, I myself, I'm like, oh, I was in a retrospective yesterday.
SPEAKER_03Thinking about my retrospective template that I'm gonna change right now, try this out. It's gonna we'll give you feedback on that. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, challenge accepted.
SPEAKER_03Really good, really good.
SPEAKER_00Oh, well, we I've been so looking forward to this conversation because Rob, you and I have debated learning from failure, success. This has been like an ongoing undertone for us for a long time in our work together. And so I've had a whole lot of fun, but I'm thinking people might also want to maybe read more about your work, follow you, maybe get your Thursday newsletters. Where can people find more?
SPEAKER_02Uh, easiest places to go to Robhatch.com, and everything that you need is there. You can check out the survey that I mentioned, links to the books are there, and uh you can also sign up for my Thursday newsletter, which you know uh comes out every week and has for the last 15 years. So amazing.
SPEAKER_00Yep, it's always there waiting for some sort of Thursday morning cup of coffee, pondering in my world. So, Rob, thank you again for being with us. Really appreciate you being here. And uh I want to give a quick shout out, if you don't mind, to our season two sponsor, Agile and Nonprofits, working to train, coach, and support nonprofits thinking about agile ways of working. You can learn more about them. Uh download their free templates, check out their trainings at agileandnonprofits.com.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And with that, Eric.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, keep driving that impact. See you next time.
SPEAKER_00Yep, see you next time.
SPEAKER_03Thanks, sis.
SPEAKER_00Well, right. Hi, Rob.
SPEAKER_03That was cool, Rob. I learned a lot today. So I'm I can't say that all the time. So I was reminded of a lot of things. Well, hey, like uh probably reminded would probably be a better word because I probably did learn all that stuff at some point from reading your books and other stuff, but it was uh it was great. I'm I'm definitely literally gonna go try that retrospective. We had we had a retrospective today, and we totally focused on the negative, you know. It's just what the team did. They went into the failures and went, we need to fix this and fix this and fix this, and here's all the stuff we're gonna do to fix those things versus hey, we had all these successes. What what are we gonna do about those? Well, how are we gonna amplify those?
SPEAKER_02Well, you know, sometimes the answer to the failure is in in the success, like the success frame. How we can approach it. Like, usually failures come from not doing the framework in the end. Like when we were using that Tom Brady analogy earlier, like it's a misstep that he made in his usual you know, framework for successfully executing a play. He might have done something wrong or someone did something wrong, but the it's just a failure of not following the success frame rather than something you need to dive into deep too deeply. And if we do that thing, uh so and I think, yeah, how do you use um your successes to you know mitigate failures more, you know, more consistently?
SPEAKER_00Um these are the things that we talk about all the time together, and the thing that I'm so sad about, some of our guests get to be with us in person this year. And I'm like, Rob, the distance, it could have been so you could have been right here with us on a hook. Next time, next time we're gonna fly you here. Next time we're gonna do that because who wouldn't want to hang out in this space, right? Right, right.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean, look, look at all the cars and the things like you've heard us, you hear us talk about these things all the time. Like, is that a Lego truck?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's a Lego truck, it's a Mac Anthem. Um, so I work in the transportation industry with commercial vehicles, and this one actually many years ago uh built it with my daughters, and it's actually uh autonomous truck, it has a uh sensor on it and some motors in the back, and it'll follow road lines and just drive around on the floor. That's really cool. Yeah, so it's kind of a cool truck that that they built with me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Legos are kind of a thing. You know that about us from when we were Lego League coaches, like yeah, Legos are uh they're a family thing.
SPEAKER_02The Mindstorm. Uh I just you know was shuffling some things around in our uh garage and came across the original Mindstorm kit that we had, you know. Um yeah, we've I've I've still got oh my gosh, there's gotta be two or three giant totes just filled with Legos in our basement that the boys are just gonna have to figure out and fight over some way.
SPEAKER_03There's a song from a band our kids like that has the AJR song.
SPEAKER_00Don't throw out my Lego, throw out my Lego, right.
SPEAKER_02I I I I don't one of the reasons that I've resisted doing that, aside from the fact that I love Legos, is my uh two stepbrothers, uh when they were in their 20s, and this is before we were actually stepbrothers, but we're close, and one lived in Alaska, one lived in New York City, and they would ship their Legos back and forth to each other every like year or you know, every so often. Just like, here you go, I'm done with them for a while, you play with them, and they would just they'd have them in their apartments and they'd build with them and play with them, and they just kept shipping them back and forth to each other. That's cool.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I love Lego. We'll have to see what happens.
SPEAKER_03The Mons type car. Yeah, I got the DeLorean here.
SPEAKER_00And of course, actually the First Lego League trophy is actually Lego.
SPEAKER_03This is one of the ones I'm most proud of. The kids had won, you know, the t teams we coached won a lot of awards, made it to the world championships and stuff. But there's one year that I actually got the coach mentor award, and that's what this one is made out of. Oh, that's so cool. Kind of one of my favorite ones. Yeah, that's cool. We use Lego a lot in our workshops and stuff too. It's a great way for people to learn. You know, it puts similar challenges on them to real work. Right. So it's it's always fun.
SPEAKER_02So, like, what's an example of like one activity that you do with with Legos?
SPEAKER_03Uh we do one that's about context switching. So they have uh three models that they have to build out of Lego. They're quite simple. One's a dog, one's a tree, one's a house. Each of them has about, I don't know, 10 pieces. And we say, uh, you know, let's do the never keep a customer waiting uh version. So, you know, every customer wants to know that their stuff's being worked on. So basically it's put one piece on each model, go back, put one piece on each model, go back, put one piece on each model, and you time it, right? And it takes like a minute. And then we say, okay, now why don't what what would be faster, right? And people intuitively go, well, working on one at a time. Okay, cool, let's do that. So they build all three of them, and it takes significantly less time because it follows Weinberg's table of context switching ways. So, you know, 40% waste if we're working on three things at once. So they can see that in the numbers. And then during that, we also have people doing quality checks and people timing it. And then we say, okay, you have three people on your team, how could you do it even faster? And they go, well, we could each build one. Okay, cool. Then they do that and it gets even faster. And then the last one, I can't give away the solution to it, but the last one we say, okay, now all the constraints are gone, except they have to, you have to take the Legos apart and put them back together. Um, how fast can you do it? Right. And then they have their own round to innovate. And the fastest teams we've seen do it go from what used to be, so it's a minute maybe for the first time, uh, that they do the each one individually, then they get it down to like 35, 40 seconds. Then when each of them they're doing it by themselves, they get it down to like 16 seconds or something. Then we've had teams in the innovation round that get it in under one second, all three models built. That's like, wow, that's innovation. And I'm not gonna tell you how they did it, but right. I know, yeah. But uh next time, but it's cool because the teams do it and they're so proud of themselves, and you're like, What'd you do it in? Oh, nine seconds? Yeah, okay. That's that's decent, but there's the world record, one second, figure it out. That's amazing. Yeah, that's one we do a lot of really fun stuff with Lego, we do much more complex stuff where they build Lego through a whole like three-day course and they learn how to scale across multiple teams to build like a city together. It's kind of fun.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, somehow it's I think it's what keeps Legos in our environment. Yeah, like we found ways to use Legos now that we're not Lego coaches, yeah. We still found ways to keep them in our business, and so therefore, we have bins of Legos.
SPEAKER_03And if anybody's listening from the Lego Corporation, we understand that it's always Lego and not Legos. We're sorry if we've embedded you that even plural is Lego, like you're building Lego. I always have trouble with that, though. I always say Lego, I do too. Because I just Lego, yeah. Yeah, it seems like it's like uh any other deer and deer, you know, multiple deers, not deers.
SPEAKER_00And there we have it. So there now you know more about our background. You're used to my book background from when we talk, or if we're like on video sometimes. Yeah, Eric hangs out with yeah, the Legos.
SPEAKER_02With Lego, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And you while you're hanging out with the guitars.
SPEAKER_02I'm hanging out with the guitars, and I actually I have a guitar Lego over there, uh, like a little fender guitar and amp, um, sitting off to the side there as well.
SPEAKER_03So and what's cool is you you probably really know how to play guitar. I have I have like three guitars over here, and I have I have no idea how to play guitar.
SPEAKER_00Just I can attest he does not. Yeah, there is not a success frame, but I've not tried far enough, you know.
SPEAKER_02It's a hard thing to work in, I I find, and and I'm only recently finally landed on a guitar, an acoustic guitar that I absolutely just it's a pure joy to hold and play. It's not crazy expensive or anything like that, but it's the nicest guitar I've ever owned. And so now every time I hold it, it just feels like it's you know, it's it's just a joy to hold and play. So I uh it makes it that's sort of a new part of the success frame because I had to take care of it. Usually some of them I can I can leave out, but there's a humidity issue and could that can affect guitars, right? So the like and this is an acoustic. So instead of having it out and available and and sort of putting success in my way in that way that it's always right there, I actually have to keep it in its case. So the I remade the process to to be the sort of joyful moment of opening the case. It's a really beautiful case and stopping and appreciating it. I just had to rethink what what it was gonna be like. So the whole thing becomes a sort of emotional experience of like opening it and seeing and pulling it out. And that's fun. Um so yeah, I had to rework my whole like put success in your way, success frame for playing guitar.
SPEAKER_00Um I love it.
unknownCool.
SPEAKER_03I love it. Maybe I could learn from that success frame then.
SPEAKER_00I don't know. All right, we have our own challenges, we're gonna work on that, Rob. It was so fun to have with you for this today. Thank you again. Thanks again for having me. Oh yeah, we'll talk to you soon.
SPEAKER_03Great to meet you, finally. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00For real, yeah, not just names anymore.
SPEAKER_03Excellent. Same, same, Rob. Really great. All right, take care. Talk soon. Take care. Take care.
unknownBye.
SPEAKER_03Bye.
