Learning to fly
A story about failure. A story about success.
Do you remember that time in your life when you were not afraid of failure? A time when you were not even aware of the concept of error, and the only things that mattered were to experience, explore and discover?
I remember it perfectly! I was a child, I wanted to be an amazon.
Then I grew up, and something got lost.
Don’t worry, nothing traumatic happened! Just life, with all its beauty and pain. Just a long, quite normal collection of small successes and failures, happy moments and disappointments. But I had this distorted idea of perfection… From my point of view adults were perfect, society was perfect, my family’s expectations were perfect, and it was my responsibility to match them 100%.
So, somewhere between my first and second year of primary school, making mistakes began the worst thing that could happen. Slowly, like drops of water shaping caves in the darkness, I lost the desire to try, to push my boundaries, to explore the world.
Year after year, I started playing safe. Scared of taking a single step towards the unknown, frozen on the spot, surrounded by judging monsters that I myself had created.
Meeting Cocoon Projects
Fast forward a few years… I finished university, I was having my first work experiences, and I was realising that adults definitely do not have everything figured out. How could it be? I was an adult, according to my ID, but basically I had no idea of what I was doing!
Then one day my partner told me about these “cool people doing cool stuff”, from a company called Cocoon Projects. I met a few of them, I started following some of their works and events. Words like “lean management” and “open collaboration” started going around, words like “adaptability” and “liquid organisation”.
I got intrigued…
During my university studies I had been fascinated by the Toyota Production System and lean production, but I had no idea they could be applied outside an assembly line.
But these amazing people in Cocoon Projects showed me a different approach, turning my small world upside down, stretching it and expanding its boundaries. What a revelation! With great compassion and humility, they were working hard to help organisations in their evolution, to face the challenges of the twenty-first century by being more open, more inclusive, and more lean.
It felt just right, natural.
A new approach towards work and life
After a while I entered Cocoon Projects and became an active contributor. With the help of this incredible family, I started learning the power of lean thinking and iterative work, the importance of exchanging frequent and honest feedback to climb a spiral of progressive improvements.
I experienced firsthand processes of transformation within companies, fostering deep alignment and collaboration in the workplace, truly empowering people, aligning the human side with the technical part of an organisation.
And in the meantime I remembered that it’s never about failure or success. It’s all about growth. Because nothing is good or bad by definition, and instead of standing at the edge of the water it’s way more interesting to surf this emanation that we call life, wave after wave.
I started to do one thing a day that scares me (from a phone call to an intercontinental trip, literally), to put myself in stress-controlled situations (knowing my limits to be able to gradually overcome them), to recognise and accept constructive criticism (sometimes I succeed, sometimes I do not), and most of all to take myself less seriously. ;)
Am I still afraid of failure? Yes.
And that’s why I keep trying!
I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
(Michael Jordan)
