Why Everyone Needs The Occasional Dumpster Fire

It’s fantastic when things go well. Generally, that’s the payoff when you’re focused on the right priorities, and your team is making good decisions on how to spend their time. For my team and I, things “going well” means that we’re leading successful workshops, and that the teams we’re working with are coming out of the sessions with impactful, user-centered solutions that they can take forward and continue developing. Generally speaking, I would put the great majority of workshops we lead firmly into this category —teams regularly tell us about the value they got from the session, and we frequently get asked to come back and help out with other projects.

But every now and then, we’re involved in a project where things don’t go so well. There are a number of reasons as to why this might happen, but the end result is a workshop where things went awry, the team didn’t feel as though they got the value they were hoping for, and we spent much of the time spinning our wheels and trying to get everyone back on track. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to call a workshop like this a “dumpster fire” — we’ve certainly used that term ourselves in the past. Those projects are tough. Not only are you physically exhausted afterwards, but you’re somewhat emotionally beaten down, left to ponder what went wrong and how you can avoid the same thing happening again in the future. It’s not fun, but as we’ve come to realize, it can be incredibly helpful.

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” — Henry Ford

Nobody likes to fail, but the truth is that without failure, it can be difficult to really improve. When things are going well, it’s generally hard to find a compelling reason to innovate — why fix what’s not broken? It’s the bad experiences (like a poor workshop in our case) that give you the opportunity to take a step back, reevaluate things, and make some changes that help to ultimately improve your offering.

For us, after a recent workshop that went poorly, this meant taking a hard look at some of the criteria we use to evaluate the types of projects we take on — something that we hadn’t previously seen a need to revisit. As a result of that exercise however, we’ve now better defined the type of work we want to get involved with. Those changes — which we likely wouldn’t have made without the motivation of that bad workshop — have made our offering stronger, and will ultimately benefit future groups and projects.

Dumpster fires aren’t generally fun, but if you use them as a learning opportunity, they can be extremely valuable.