That time I failed and didn’t die.
I'm not exactly sure at what point I lost my mind and agreed to run a triathalon, but I did. To be clear, I am not an athlete. I am not athletic. I don't run (bad knees), I don't swim (deviated septum), and my bike and I haven't been on speaking terms since I was in high school. Nevertheless, the unbounded optimism of my coworkers and some healthy peer pressure got me to sign up for a super sprint triathalon to raise money for Kids in the Game (a great charity that helps enable kids that can't afford to participate in sports to have what they need to be able to be a part of those sports). I started training with the help of those optimistic coworkers, and I immediately started failing.
That's right - unsurprisingly, I really suck at swimming, biking, and running.
It did NOT come easy to me. I wasn't starting from zero (I did, in fact, know how to ride a bike and how to swim), but it was close. I didn't know how to do any of it very well. There's breathing techniques when you're swimming and ways to adjust your bike seat and ways to pace your steps that help you be more efficient when you're doing these things. And none of it is easy to learn, or at least for me. You have to do it over and over and over. And each time, you're doing it mostly wrong, but a little less wrong than you did it last time. It was frustrating - I swallowed a lot of pool water, consumed a lot of ibuprofen, and, most of all, I learned. I learned that when I swim, I need to do the back stroke or use nose plugs. I learned how to push myself a little bit further than I though I could. I learned the great feeling that is having a community of encouragement work with you towards your goals. And I learned that I am really not very good at triathalons and that no amount of training would change that.
#Truth
History is filled with examples of how failure leads to learning and ultimately success.
Thomas Edison famously failed 10,000 times before he came up with a working light bulb - but he framed it as a learning experience saying he found 10,000 ways NOT to do it. Michael Jordon missed over 9000 shots on goal - but framed his constant failure as motivation to succeed. Bill Gates , JK Rowling , Walt Disney - the list of successful people who failed and used that failure as a learning opportunity goes on.
Science also tells us that failure is good for learning. Making mistakes lets us create a "trial and error" environment, where we refine our understanding of the problem and solution (source). However, it seems that this only holds true if we can get out of our own way (source) - when we view something as a personal failure and have ego invested, we learn less. After a moment of consideration, this seeming contradiction isn't particularly surprising - as a society we consistently reward success and denigrate failure from a very early age (who gets an attaboy for failing chemistry or math?), told that everyone needs to be good at everything or you're just not trying hard enough. You don't get a raise for failing, you get written up. It's far easier to watch other people fail and learn from that because it's not personal - it's not you.
So how do we build environments that make it safe for people to fail when the training they've received and the context we work in is built, from it's foundation, to do the opposite? How do we leverage the lessons from Thomas Edison and Walt Disney to encourage failure at work?
We found that the keys to turning failure were:
Reframing. Instead of talking about our "failures" we talked about our "experiments". Experiments are trials - we don't know how they're going to turn out, so, by definition, they can't fail - they can only teach. And we encouraged lots and lots of experiments. If all your experiments had the expected result, you're not pushing hard enough, trying hard enough. A motorcross racer once famously said "If you never lay the bike down, how do you know how fast it can go?" If you never make a mistake or try something that doesn't work, you don't know how far you can go.
Constraints. It was important to not just provide an open-ended opportunity for experimentation - that is both intimidating and counterproductive. To help people focus on the things we wanted to learn about, we created constraints around the areas to experiment - boxes they could work in and feel safe to fail. Like any good experiment, we needed a well-articulated hypothesis, and what we would do with the results (whether positive or negative), and how that would move the business forward. By giving our people this box, we were able to help them be creative and push boundaries in a way that gave them a safety net for their egos.
Celebrations. We made sure to celebrate our failed experiments as much as our successful ones. The message was that you were rewarded for trying and learning and sharing the results. And whether your hypothesis was proven or disproven, didn't matter as much as knowing more today than we did before. These celebrations were frequent and public to ensure the entire group knew the results and could benefit from them.
Adjust. On a personal level, we changed how we approached goals. Goals are often set at the beginning of the year and are expected to be worked on all year without change. In a fast-paced development environment, this is not only unrealistic, but potentially damaging as people work towards goals that no longer represent their capabilities or capacity. Instead, we set long term goals at the department level that represented the company needs and individual goals were set by quarter. That way, as we discovered individual's strengths and weaknesses, adjusted projects to account for the shifting market needs, and accounted for increased or decreased capacity, we were able to change those goals to be realistic and achievable.
By implementing these approaches, we successfully built a culture that was free to fail. The learnings we took away benefitted the entire company in ways we hadn't expected and we quickly became a place where people would bring their ideas in the hopes we could try those ideas out for them.
So, how did my triathalon go?
When the time came for the big race and I was ready. I'd been working out every day, biking and swimming, and walking fast (my knees would not tolerate the slow jog I tried to accomplish). I was excited and nervous. And I made myself commit to two goals:
#1: Don't die.
#2: Finish.
I figured if I accomplished those two things, I could be really proud of myself and I would walk away having learned some really important things.
It was a chilly October day and all of us stood on the docks of the lake for the first part of the triathalon wearing our neon pink swim caps. And I realized something important. I was NOT ready.
But the whistle sounded and off we went anyway. The swim was brutal. I'm reasonably certain I swallowed half the lake. In my training, I had failed to think through that 1) this was an open water swim (I had only trained in a pool, inside) and 2) the swim is the FIRST thing you do (I had always made it the last because then I was already wet and could hit the showers). Thankfully, I accomplished my first goal, thanks to multiple helps from coworkers in kayaks, and didn't die.
Once I finished the swim, I walked quickly (and with a great deal of shivering) to my bike and got ready to ride. That's when I realized something else - most of my rides had been around the parks near my house. And they were...flat. The first mile of this route was nearly straight up hill. I gritted my teeth, remembered what I'd been told about shifting gears and started up. I had to stop four times up that hill, but once I got to the top, I was able to finish the 10 miles in decent time.
Finally I sped walk my way through the last part. One of my fellow trainees was there with me, her knees and hip aching and giving her problems. We stuck together with everyone cheering us on and finally, happily, crossed the finish line. Second goal achieved!
It was a great moment for me - I had failed and failed and failed, learned about myself and my strengths (I'm very persistent) and weaknesses (I am not good at swimming) and had readjusted my expectations to play to those strengths. I did not win. I did not come in at a record time. But I finished and I didn't die. And I learned. Which is winning.
