Learning to Fail One Lean Step at a Time

Why — or maybe better how — after years of avid planning, I made friends with failure and embraced agile & lean practices

Failure is not an option. Gemini 5 Flight Director & NASA legend Gene Kranz and his team would know — but did you know they were also experts in iterative working practices and agile thinking? — NASA on the Commons, no known © restrictions.

It was 1985 and I was sat at the desk in my dad’s study in front of his Hewlett-Packard HP 110 — which back then felt like a very fancy laptop. With a freshly installed copy of Lotus 1–2–3 and an Argos catalogue at my side I set about planning all the things I needed to buy in order to decorate and furnish my new imaginary home. I must have been all of 6 or 7 years old and this was my first memory of project planning … <slightly awkward blush>.

Fast forward 30 years and as a policy advisor, I need to be organised alongside being creative. I’m increasingly shunning the development of drawn-out project plans and months-long work schedules in favour of a different way of working.

I’ve adopted agile and lean thinking in as many areas of my work as possible, and I’m reaping the benefits of this way of working. I’m more relaxed and I get better results.

Planning is in my DNA

As you can probably gather, from a young age, planning was my thing. From forecasting the profit on the grass cuttings I’d sell to my neighbours for their compost heap, to managing the school-wide distribution of milk cartons by a student workforce, planning has undeniably always been my thing.

In my line of work, strong planning abilities is a really helpful skill. Plus, who doesn’t like to have a colleague, a teammate or friend who is good at planning?

Stepping out of my comfort-zone has been a long overdue

Moving through the planning cycle can be satisfying, but it has it’s downfalls — it can quickly lead to frustration, can be bureaucratic & time-consuming, and doesn’t necessarily give you the framework for delivering successful products consistently. And I began to feel this pain.

Within the Europeana office, the work was — back in 2014/15 — meticulously planned thanks to the short-term cyclical nature of our funding at that time. At the same time, we were encouraged to explore different ways of working within the boundaries of our project plans.

Working for an organisation where the directors embrace and encourage experimentation, success and ultimate failure was the catalyst I didn’t realise I needed.

In 2014 as part of a small project team led by Harry Verwayen, one of our directors, we turned to lean startup to solve a roadblock we just hadn’t been able to get past. It was a transformative process that left a lasting impression on me.

Motivated by wanting to learn from others, but not really finding many stories online — I wrote up my first experience of lean startup

That was four years ago. After the spent time out on maternity leave, I took up my mantle for Europeana once again and by the end of 2016 was really craving a repeat of the satisfaction I got from my first experience with lean startup. But I also returned with a renewed confidence (and quite possibly a tiny bit less patience).

An unexpected change, from an unexpected source

Another significant change I saw in myself was that I was more open to failing. Being a parent to twins gave me a crash course in accepting failure. Or perhaps better still, brought me the insight to embrace the tiny steps you take toward success.

In the beginning your expectations are low. Let’s keep everyone alive. Day by day you try something new, build a bit of consistency, deal with curveball — or six — here and there. Before you know it, you’ve got a baby doing exactly what you want them to. Then their requirements change … and you have to start all over again.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it. You finally get into your comfort zone on a project and wham! you need to deal with something new, something unexpected, a curveball.

Turning this experience into an effective working practice

Faced with some new professional challenges I looked for more ways to utilise my new friendship with failure.

I explored my own work history and took a look back at what approaches had worked, what hadn’t and what had felt good. Because how you feel, is important.

I looked to projects such as #PublicDomainMonth where I ran a small team of volunteers from across the office to quickly develop a flash awareness raising campaign — which had been very rewarding due to its dynamism, team spirit and productivity.

With one article posted each week through July 2014, we raised awareness of a cause close to our heart — Europeana, CC BY-SA

Through to the bigger scale projects I led such as the development and implementation of a new governance model that provided formal recognition to a network of thousands of cultural heritage professionals— which had gone very smoothly thanks to a strong dedicated team and lots of preparation that helped us deal with the challenges of simultaneously creating and delivering an operational model inside a tight timescale.

And there it was. I saw that preparation and team working, not planning, was the consistent factor.

In 2014 we transformed a unaffiliated network into a legally recognised Network Association, running elections to find 25 Members Councillors to represents the thousands of professional in the network

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail

So I learned more about agile and lean working practices thanks to great colleagues, a curious mind, a few good web resources and being married to a seasoned agile pro.

I found that good preparation is a common feature between agile and lean ways of working, and of lean startup. Without preparation, you can’t understand your assumptions under the lean startup approach, let alone prioritise which ones to test. Following an agile approach would be impossible if you had not prepared sufficiently to evaluate which functions or features your development should focus on next.

With the support of my colleagues, I took a [very] deep breath, embraced the prospect of failure and found opportunities to experiment with different approaches. After hitting a roadblock in making our impact framework into a practical tool for professionals in the sector to use, I took what felt like a bold step. I lead the impact team into adopting agile and lean working practice to iteratively develop the playbook.

You can read about how these iterative way of working helped develop the impact playbook and what we learned — Europeana, CC BY-SA

Twelve months later… and I’ve taken another step forward and am using iterative working approaches proactively rather than as a fix to overcome a roadblock. In almost all areas of my work, I am drawing on these experiences to help build better products — whether it be the growing copyright community or the soon to be updated impact playbook.

And I’m still experimenting with new approaches — my current favourite is Lean Coffee. Something I very happily stumbled upon through a seemingly unrelated-to-lean article by Cogapp’s Director of Web Development Tristan Roddis. It’s an approach I definitely recommend checking out.

As Chair of the impact task force, I used the opportunity of our first meeting of professionals from across Europe to run a Lean Coffee session as a way to get the conversation flowing … and boy did it work well!

Looking back, the cues to developing better working practices were there all along. I just needed to embrace them.

There isn’t one thing I can say was the differentiating factor in this change in approach. More a confluence of them during a period of time where both my personal and professional experiences were being challenged.

Recognising them and acting on them didn’t happen overnight. There was no aha! moment. What did make me more conscious that this different way of working was worth paying more attention to — and which many professionals embrace — was the increase in satisfaction I had in my work, and in those around me. That together we felt rewarded by our achievements, and everything just felt that bit more relaxed.

What about you? How do different working practices get adopted in your organisation? Have you brought new approaches — or even agile practices into your work place? How did they work out?

I work in a not for profit setting, across a pan European — and sometimes international — network, with remote teams developing and delivering great (and effective) policy.

I write about using agile & lean startup principles, and how organisations can articulate their economic and social impact — by designing, assessing and narrating their impact. And sometimes a little bit about my project of passion.