#sharethefail
Things go wrong
Regularly.
All of the time.
By way of example, I’ve done a talk on this topic a few times. It was advertised as this once:
I have literally no clue what that might be. Maybe this?
Here’s another one
I declared myself product lead for a multi-million pound program in front of hundreds of people and the cabinet office minister. I am not.
Want a few more examples?
There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.
Nice job Steve Balmer! Maybe stick to being sweaty and screaming the word developers over and over…
Let’s take one more famous example from history.
This guy built this amazing planet destroying space station.
Check it out. Having the craic blasting planets and what not.
However, they made a seemingly small mistake in their perimeter defences, some kid in a home made star fighter turns up…
BOOOOM! Massive failure.
Failure of this magnitude is terrible. It’s all types of bad.
Why do we hate to fail?
The enormo-fail outlined above is a nightmare scenario. You get big shouty managers telling you you’re going to cripple the world’s economy. Your team are going to cause the downfall of modern society itself.
It’s the sort of thing that ends up on the news.
When we look at big projects this still happens all the time.
Why do we try to avoid failing so much?
How about this…
💩 FEAR
It’s scary to get things wrong.
Lots of us have been sold this idea of ‘professionalism’ where that equals never being wrong, wearing a smart outfit and getting it right every time.
I get it. We spend ages building the image that we are ultimate badass professionals. We must not let the mask slip. Failure is the crushing death that comes for us all.
😟 UNCERTAINTY
Oh god. There is so much we don’t know. But we can’t admit that. WE ARE PROS.
💣 THE SHEER STUPEFYING MAGNITUDE OF EPIC FAIL
Stuff could go so so wrong. Dark places inevitably lead to darker ones. What if, when left to fester in a land where wrong is no option turn into bigger what ifs. I might get sacked. I might end up on the news. I might end up answering really difficult questions posed by incredibly angry representatives our great nation (whichever one you happen to be living in).
Pretty horrifying.
It gets worse
What we end up creating off the back of this is even more horrifying. Crippling relentlessly pressured, 6th to 7th circle of hell working environments.
It encourages incredibly awful behaviours where we don’t really know what we are trying to achieve, apart from continuing the ‘everything is cool’ theatre.
Watermelon reporting abounds. You know the sort, your ‘Red Amber, Green’ report indicates wall to wall emeralds, everything is fine, changing the message the higher up the management ladder you get, until before you know it, the cost of failure is so high everything is a death march, weekend working and everything sucks.
We try to protect ourselves up front with fear based decisions, incredible risk aversion, big design up front and nobody gets sacked for buying IBM thinking.
You know what? Keep doing that if you want to wither on the vine and have people quit regularly. Maybe that’s your thing.
The world deserves better.
Let’s get stuff wrong
Seriously. Let’s get it wrong. When we go wrong we learn. But if we are going to go wrong, let’s not go wrong this way:
I am in no way suggesting that we on purpose go about failing constantly, there are better ways to avoid failure (i’ll maybe write a thing about that) but don’t be afraid of it.
Fail small and fail fast. But above all else LEARN from the failure. By doing so, you can create a world where we accept reality. Failure happens.
The way this works best is when others can learn from your mistakes.
Make it cool to mess up
Make it OK to say ‘I messed up’. Even better, make it something people can be proud of.
Create an environment and a culture that supports this. Everyone will win from this.
In Kainos, where I work right now, after I delivered a talk on this, we created a channel on Slack called #sharethefail. It’s been awesome. Turns out I’m not the only senior person that works there that’s an idiot.
Guess what, other people have learned from things i’ve messed up.
People have started being more open about sharing when things go wrong, but even better, they talk about what they’ll do next time.
Being open about it means people are more willing to ask for help too.
Win.
So what can you take away from this?
Failure happens.
No big deal. Learn from it. Make it ok.
Share the fail.
Footnote
I thought it was about time that I convert a talk I’ve given a few times now into a post, hopefully spread it around a bit! Below are some other relevant readings that might help you on your journey to understand, learn from, and avoid failure.
Images
Black Box Thinking
Turned out part of what I was talking about is something Matthew Syed has written a book about, black box thinking, which is all about learning from failure. I can recommend it.
Watermelon reporting
Conundrum: Why every government gets things wrong and what we can do about it
An example of people not learning from mistakes can be found in this book. Sadly the same mistakes have continued to happen.
GDS Service Design Manual
I’ve talked a lot above about learning from failure. There are ways to avoid it, when building a digital service, a marvellous place to start is with the GDS Service Manual, which helps guide you to learning continuously when building Digital Services, and constantly ask questions that help steer you away from being mega wrong.
Blameless Postmortems
Part of learning from failure is by not making it personal. Systems fail not people. This post from John Allspaw at Etsy on how they deal with incidents is a great lesson on how to do this right.
