Failure = Freedom. Is that really true?
For many organizations, it is. These groups of developers... or marketers or educators... are applying the belief that "failing faster" is how we get better. That digging into disasters is how things get better.
This is all a subculture of the agile way of working, by the way.
So, how can you do this too?
The incident
First, you have an incident. These happen every day. The mindset to have here is "issues and problems are a part of our daily life; they are normal and mean work is getting done." Versus a mindset of "let's do everything we can to avoid problems; problems mean something is wrong." Problems are part of work. When one happens you can have a calm, natural response for what to do next.
The response
For some teams, they identify the problem, throw around a little passive aggressive blame and move on with anxiety for the next time another problem comes up. As they do.
This is what innovative, healthy teams do: They have a postmortem that results in corresponding action items.
A healthy postmortem...
- is planned and expected
- is blameless
- is related to the incident
- gives insights into the work you're doing today
- helps your team plan for the future
When failure is normalized, teams can have respect for accidents and failures and dig on the problem in an honest way.
"For someone to go from being in a situation where they're fearful of what might happen to a place in which they can try to experiment and try to grow and try to figure out what might be the right answer, is really great to see. It's like they blossom," says Jen Krieger, Chief Agile Architect at Red Hat, in the latest Command Line Heroes podcast.
Failure as freedom.
For concrete examples of how failure can make things better, listen to episode 4 of the Command Line Heroes podcast.
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