This is a recorded session from the 2024 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. In the museum field, we work tirelessly to create safe environments where our visitors can explore, build skills, discover, and learn – but how are we creating safety in our workplace for our staff to push themselves and embrace failure as a positive part of the process that helps us to learn about ourselves as individuals and as team members? This session brings the power of hands-on maker learning to build skills and capacity for work processes that foster a culture of belonging and a “failing forward” approach.

Additional resources:

Not the F Word You Know: Embracing Failure to Move Forward course materials

Transcript

Jacqueline Eyl: Clearly you know by now you are in a session about failure. And I think you know, what Annalise just set you up to do is really a chance for us to think all about what we are doing in museums. So, my name is Jackie Eyl. I am the chief program officer at Kid Museum and we will formally introduce ourselves now. I will let you know that, let’s see, at Kid Museum, I have been there for almost three years, and we have grown at warp speed. We’ve more than doubled our space. We’ve more than doubled our staff, and we are an evolving organization.

And so I have a close and friendly and intimate relationship with failure, almost on a daily basis. And it’s something that I’ve had to really embrace and understand that we are forging new ground. We are making new things. We are creating new policies every day. Very rarely is it, let’s just do it like the time before and iterate on it. We are creating newness on a regular basis.

So failure is something that we have to really become resilient to and fail forward. I’m going to turn it over to my colleagues and our guest here today for them to introduce themselves and for them to tell you their relationship with failure.

Cat Scharon: All right. Hi there. My name is Kat Sharon. I am the senior manager of research and evaluation at Kid Museum. I’m a relatively new person within that expansion. I have been there for a little under a year now. And failure is something that comes up in my realm too. Anybody else here? Evaluation, research, have your hands in that at all? Yay, evaluators. You know the data collection, especially with people, does not always go the way that you’ve planned. Sometimes there aren’t the people that you expect to be there. Sometimes your tools break. A survey question doesn’t make sense to anyone as much as you revised it over and over again. It’s the same kind of trial and error process sometimes. We try to take away learning and get better. It’s also part of why we come to events like this and come together as a field so that we can learn from each other about those things that we’ve found out the hard way don’t always work the way we intended.

And sometimes those unintended consequences are actually positive and something worth looking at again in a new light.

Adam Maltese: And hi everyone, I’m Adam Maltese. First of all, I want to say thank you for coming out. We were worried like we were thrown a party that maybe two or three people would show up. This is amazing and great.

I’m a faculty member at Indiana University in the School of Education and I you know spend part of my time thinking about formal schooling and kids in that space and then a good portion of the time working with our friends at museums and thinking about particularly making and engineering and failing in informal spaces and what that looks like and Jackie mentioned that she you know she fails every few days or something like that. I am failing all the time, so she’s, I think, winning out. I’ve been doing, and I’ll talk about this in a little bit, but we’ve been doing research on failure for a number of years now, and so it is daily that things are coming to the forefront of my mind. And even when I think that I haven’t failed, my kids will throw it back in my face and make sure that I remember that I work in that space.

So thank you all for coming out, and we’re really excited to share with you today.

Jacqueline Eyl: And now, we’d like for you to tell us who you are, so take a minute and let us know what type of museum or organization do you represent, you can scan the QR code and I’ll give you a minute and then we’ll figure out who’s in the room because that is going to guide us in some of our dialog today.

Okay, so just a little bit of context for why we came up with the idea for this session.

At Kid Museum, we have a framework that we apply to all of our learning experiences with the children and families that we work with. We call it Mind of a Maker. These are the attributes and characteristics that we build in all of our learning experiences.

And we’ve been doing this for 10 years, and we’ve been iterating on this and really working towards it, really making sure that we are creating a safe environment to push children, our learners to really take risks, build their skills, and persevere through that process. We work tirelessly at this. It is where our heart is. It is where our passion is.

And we realized we do this pretty well with our kids. We’re not doing it with our staff. In fact, in many cases, we’re setting them up to fail the way we set you up to fail in the activity that you just did. And we started thinking about how are we going to, you know, how are we going to walk the walk? How are we going to practice what we preach? Because we are makers too. And if our staff is burning out, if they are feeling disengaged, they are feeling like they don’t have agency, they are feeling like they don’t have the tools, the skills, and they are working within an environment that doesn’t have a failing forward culture what does that mean for us? How are we going to thrive and survive as an organization.

So that got us thinking and we decided that we would take a risk and we would come to AAM and we would share with you not the shining example that you sometimes see at the sessions, that we are, we did this, we did it well, we succeeded, we’re going to share with you the fact that we weren’t doing it well. And so we decided to start a process of figuring this out.

And we did that by really trying to assess our staff. So we’re really going to want to assess you first, with one question that we asked our staff which is “what are two words that come to your mind when you think about failure?”

I’m going to turn it over to Adam now because what we are seeing up here is now is not surprising to us and especially is probably not surprising to Adam. And he’s going to share with you some of the research he’s done on failure to sort of set some grounding for us.

Adam Maltese: Yeah, thanks. You can go ahead. yeah, thanks you can go ahead if you don’t mind it. So yeah let’s talk about this a little bit the I wanted to present our definition of failure not as the definition of failure but as our current definition of failure and we’ve actually this one hasn’t changed very much since our team started you know doing research in this space a number of years ago. And I think it generally works for us and so I don’t want to I don’t want to spend time really talking through it but I’ve sort of over my career learned that actually it works well when we are trying to share with others if we define some of the ways that we’re thinking about these things and you can disagree but you know it helps you to know sort of what we’re thinking about.

And so basically for failure we’re thinking you have an intention the people who design the activity have an intention right there’s other people all sorts of different people who might have intentions and if the outcome doesn’t match that it’s some form of failure and so that’s the type of failure that we’re thinking about and we talk a little bit about some of the different types of that. And just I have on there the particularly in the realm of making and maker space activities right this but this this applies I think broadly to the idea that that might be a function of. The tools themselves failing right you tried to do something and you didn’t expect it but computer broke down or your server went down or something like that the to the materials failing so you might have had situations I think with the toothpick right of these other ones where the tool itself does not work sorry the materials don’t work. And then there’s other failures that might be internal or external that go along with that.

So there’s also different scales of failure right this is a picture of the bridge not too far from here that was run into by a shipping a massive shipping boat whatever that that means cargo boat and collapsed now we don’t have the full debrief on this right and I do not put this up in in a sort of joking sort of way and we are concerned about all the families and all the people that were involved in this. But when you have a failure at this scale it is inevitably going to be many types of smaller failures that are part of that system right where things went wrong.

So we sort of call these big macro failures right these are the failures we like to think about a company goes belly up you know a bridge collapses those types of things are the sort of macro failures that we are often thinking of but those are not the only ones and there’s often these sort of tiny failures that are happening as well in the context of making and tinkering particularly with kids we often talk about as kids are designing and building things these are the types of failures that we really want them to spend time thinking about and this is probably where the most learning can happen the micro failure of having a battery in the wrong way right some of these other things not having enough resources to just do the thing you need to do there’s probably not a lot of learning that happens in that that’s just more of a let’s get you let’s sort of get that fixed and let’s move on.

And we think that the time on all of these leads to frustration and it’s an it’s an aggregation so with every one of those frustrations it just sort of builds up builds up and then it can lead to an emotional response or people wanting to quit or or something like that.

If we can go on.

So I’m just going to give a pretty brief overview of some of the general background about some of the failure research some of it we’ve sort of been involved in others we have not but just to talk about a couple of the ideas and again I am often gonna frame this in the realm of working with kids but I don’t think it’s a it’s a hard connection to make with the workplace or adults or anything like that. So one of the ideas is productive failure and desirable difficulty and the general idea is a that failure should not always be a negative consequence and a lot of people have told us that the only true failure is when that is the end of the road so to speak when people don’t cons continue to try to learn from that and move forward. Desirable difficulty is the way it sounds the idea that people can learn the most or they can advance or grow the most when things are sort of at the right level of difficulty usually it’s out of their direct reach without support but it’s not so far out of reach that there’s just like no way that they can actually do that.

Right so asking one person to put on a huge experience that’s probably too far a field but putting something you know helping somebody grow by having to reach for something and then trying to provide them some support that’s really what we’re often looking for. Error friendly climate our friends in math education do a lot of this work but I actually just found an interesting paper today that I put in a folder that we share with you about error friendly business climate. And the idea here is just like Jackie was talking about before you embrace failure we’re all going to make mistakes, let’s not just shun these you know shun these put them behind the podium whatever not talk about them we don’t have to share them with everyone right when they walk in the door but not hide them and embrace them and say okay what can we learn from these and there’s a variety of ways people do this.

One of the ones I love from a school near me in Indiana is they do a standing meeting every morning with the staff and they basically say all right like who’s who has had a failure happened in the last you know day or two. That person shares about 30 seconds and they’ll say like do you want do you want input you know or do you just want a vent if they want input then people just sort of throw out ideas for two or three minutes and then they check back in with them the next day or two days later or whatever and just say like hey did any of that work.

Right so this idea that you can make mistakes and that’s how we’re growing the more that that can be supported rather than saying you have to be perfect here and I don’t want I don’t want to see any mistakes and you know definitely don’t want to hear about them. Error friendly climate is supportive in that way and it’s not just oh you can make mistakes but you got to fix them it’s you can make mistakes but you know we got to communicate so that we can help support you through that. Mindset matters so if people on your staff in your group have what we’ve started thinking about as something more of like perfectionist tendencies and they think that those above them do not agree with this idea of error friendly climate right or not tolerant of mistakes then it’s going to lead to trouble. Right this is where that sort of hiding things or not wanting to share being afraid fearful that you’re going to have a negative evaluation on your job that sort of thing is not going to work out and so you’ve got to have this whether it’s growth mindset or other failure mindset or something tied to it the idea is I can learn from this or we can learn from this and move forward.

Even though I say that and I I’m pretty sure that this is the choir there are a lot of folks out there who do not have a sort of failure forward failure friendly mindset. And just like some other of these big education ideas that we often talk about mindset is generally believed to be dependent on the context. So typically somebody is not always growth mindset or always positive toward failure right you might be positive toward failure when you work out or you play pickle ball or you do something like that but yet in your job you know can’t have it or with your kids or something like that so so it’s really important to just think about how you can embrace this idea that look you we can learn from this.

And then it’s you know super important for us to think about especially anyone who oversees others or the folks you have coming in and visiting your museum or your organization is where the role where your role tradition and position and power and racism and all of those biases play a role in this okay. This often comes up when you hear companies like Google or some others say oh fail early fail off and right this is the best way and I’ve had a number of people who have smaller companies say yeah they can say that because they’ve got you know lots of reserves and not that it’s wrong but it’s easier to say this when you’re in a position of power where failure doesn’t necessarily mean you know truly you’re going to have to you know sleep in your car or something like that.

So really thinking about how you can support this and support it in a meaningful way for others based on their situations.

All right so a couple more things and then I will stop talking for now. So perspectives vary there’s again some of these things I sometimes feel ridiculous saying but it’s worth saying that people have different views on failure. It’s not all positive. It’s not all negative. Even internally we have different views about those different experiences right. But they’re typically pretty strong our experience is that when you start talking to people about failure there’s often a pretty strong feeling that they have they’re either sort of pretty strongly positive and embracing of it or pretty strongly like nope we don’t talk about that. And they can say that in a couple different ways it’s either the we don’t want failure or we don’t use failure we use all these other words but we don’t use failure right.

So there’s strong viewpoints and I think I have this somewhere on there, kids have some of those they’ve inherited a lot of those from us but generally in our research with kids they sort of go eh and they had this really positive set of like oh yeah it didn’t work oh well I’ll just try it again. Right and we’re like oh that’s really healthy that’s great you know can you turn around and teach all the adults in the room. So anyway so thinking about this idea that that that people have these different viewpoints one of the reasons I also wanted to bring that up and one of the reasons we connected is the team that I work with we have been for the last couple years doing a project with science center’s primarily around trying to support educators from science centers to think about how they can support learners to make mistakes during making. And when we started that project, we were thinking this is great we’ got a couple years we’re going to work with these folks we’re going to co-create materials content training with them and it’s gonna you know the kids are going to benefit yay.

What we didn’t realize and this is this truly was bridging you know from the start of the pandemic until now was how much the adults who we were working with like folks in this room we couldn’t we didn’t even start talking about the kids until a year and a half into the project. There was so much I hesitate to say the word but trauma strong feelings emotion about failure that that they needed to process and work through that we spent quite a bit of time working on sort of as adults our conceptions of failure and our experiences with failure and our concern about failing the kids who were serving and all of those things. That we only after sort of we gave space for that and like I said we entered without thinking we needed to do that but realized with our with our peers over time that that was the right choice that that you so sorry so the message here is partly you can’t just leave that in a bottle just assume that that like that’ll fix itself or you can jump straight to this you need to give people a time and a space when you’re engaging in this to be able to talk and debrief and put out there their thoughts their feelings about failure.

And probably especially if this is in a professional context this idea of sort of you know looking at folks that they might manage and people that they might work with looking at peers on maybe the same know level and then looking up at maybe the leadership and getting a sense of all of those right because as I think Analise said before you sometimes think that you know bring a great mindset and whatever but maybe you’re not getting the same vibe from above. A lot of the museums we worked with said well like in our mission we embrace failure but pretty sure the leadership doesn’t actually like believe in that right and embrace it.

All right two more quick things the on the right up there it says professionals often transition from field so we did a where we started in this work was we were watching making experiences happen in our in our small local Science Center in after school programming and there was interesting stuff happening I won’t I won’t go into it but there was interesting stuff happening we had GoPro cameras on the kids so we could watch all these videos of like what their experience looked like from their perspective. And at the same time a woman work working with me was interviewing engineers and computer scientists. And this was starting to come up in some of those conversations we were saying so like how did you go from being a kid interested in this to an adult working in this field. And they started talking about how they were they were that failure is important but they were never given the chance to fail until late in graduate school or as professionals. And they all universally said that’s too late. Right that they lost people like we lost this is where my brain is every day they lost people from stem because people failed and they’re like oh I can’t do this I must leave. Right and so we were thinking and talking a lot about that topic.

And what they talked about was they often transitioned from I failed right the first time things didn’t work out it was always this internal like it must be me I’m not smart enough I’m not good enough I don’t belong here. They finally developed this sense of you know yeah there might be like a small piece that’s me but a lot of this is it failed or we failed right or something external sort of caused us to fail and that that became a much healthier way for them to think about this. That sure again as a system we probably play a small role in this but you know a lot of this lives out of ourselves and so that’s one of the ideas that we’ve sort of brought forward is that it’s important to think about this sort of this externalizing they call it locus of control but basically sort of putting this attribution of failure outside of yourself as important. And that last one is basically just to be clear that we are the ones that have the scary fear of failure for the most part. The kids did not really seem to have that. So try to think about that of like not yeah not putting that on them if you’re working with them directly because they seem to have a pretty healthy understanding of that and again I think we can we can sort of gain some from gain some insight from them.

Thank you.

Jacqueline Eyl: Okay so as I said we at Kid museum decided we were going to take an internal look at ourselves and we were going to put ourselves out there and share this with you we’re not coming to you as an organization that has that is sharing the successes but we’re coming to you as an organization that is starting a journey and we want to share with you some of the tools that we are beginning to put in place to to travel this journey with our staff. And one particular wonderful staff member that we have is with us today Cat Sharon and she brought with her to Kid museum the ability to do research and evaluation. And often we think about that as well let’s evaluate what we’re doing with our audiences we turn the lens on to ourselves so I’m going to let her share the study that we are conducting that we’ve conducted and what we’re going to do with it.

Cat Scharon: Okay all right thanks so much so I I see this evaluation that I’m about to share as kind of a case study of what’s happening at Kid museum what it’s like to be as part of a museum staff thinking about failure in all of these different contexts and in that way it’s kind of the practice meeting the research side of what Adam has just shared with us. I’m also going to say that there are many more questions in finding from this study that we did and those will be available in that folder that Adam was mentioning that we’re going to share with you at the end of this session.

So this is really the top level a couple of examples and I’m going to tell you a little bit of the structure and how this survey that we did with our team worked so that this is something that you can also think about perhaps doing with your own teams when you get back from this conference. So this was a a survey that we did on online for our staff completely anonymous as you can see we are smaller than some museums larger than others we have about 46 staff members at the present and we got about half of them to respond which is great. But you can see that we have you know differing representation of levels within the museum organization and I bring that up mostly because that is an important thing to be keeping in mind here it’s not something that’s really factored into the analysis you’ll see but to the point about there being privilege and power at stake in these different kinds of conversations the fact that these are jobs these are livelihoods that is an important piece of the external context and internal context here so I just want to be sure to that we’re kind of upfront about these perspectives and always keeping that in the back of our minds.

The colors have not quite translated here but earlier we asked you what two words come to mind when you think about failure. And I saw a lot of learning saw opportunity in there saw shame and a lot of these are the same things that our staff came up when they were asked basically the same question so if we start kind of at 12 o’clock and go around the clock face we have the really negative disastrous kind of feelings about what failure brings up for you. Getting into the emotional pretty negative feelings but maybe not as bad as a catastrophe doomed and low point that we have in the disastrous section there difficult frustration disappointment we saw a lot of those in the world Cloud that we generated here too. Then we get into this thinking about it as a as a risk and reward kind of it’s a calculation thinking about what it would look like to be successful or not successful coming into the fact that it’s inevitable the fact that we’re going to fail at some things sometimes and then kind of turning the corner as we get into six o’clock here that because it’s inevitable it’s also a temporary state not everything is going to fail all of the time which then starts to grow into this new mindset. And I think that it’s important that we recognize that this whole range of feelings that that failure evokes in US is valid and part of this conversation and why this is so complicated to unpack within our staff and thinking about how to change something that is a large busy organization with multiple departments multiple divisions multiple people multiple kinds of audiences and programs.

It’s not one thing the idea of failure and so the first portion of our survey was really to unpack what failure means to our staff in different contexts and what significance it has for them as a result.

So we began by asking them you know where can failure be productive if anywhere where do you see it actually being something that might be positive for you. And the number one answer there was skill building a lot of people were able to recognize that in order to grow and practice exactly as Adam was saying when we have these kind of growth opportunities for skill-based learning. You have to have it kind of at that right challenge point so that you stay engaged you find new exceptions and are able to gain something and A New Perspective out of it when it Le to learning very similarly is a theme that emerged as well but what I find really fascinating are these three and four the tide in my job and career some people saw that it could be productive. And in Creative or Performing Arts Endeavors that they were they were taking on in their own time sometimes those happy little accidents turn out to be really meaningful parts of the experience.

And so the fact that those are both right there is something that I really want to highlight because I think ites does emphasize the ways in which failure can be framed differently for different people and in different contexts. Ao this mindset idea is one that we can practice and learn and try to bring into our lives more but it might not always succeed either.

We then moved in this survey towards the sort of hypothetical what does it look like to make failure more safe for you what would make it feel more comfortable how could you be supported in general. And it’s that network of friends family co-workers depending on the context but the people around you being able to make it safe and make you feel supported and that you will be okay a mistake has happened and we can work together to keep moving. Having the opportunity to experiment as well and that that makes sense given the way that our programs and teaching in museums and schools often with try to use the scientific method coming up with hypotheses you might be right you might be wrong you keep trying and iterating and experimenting. Again also the happy accidents idea that we saw in the Creative and Performing Arts thing.

And really even as we keep going down this list they’re all still about this kind of interpersonal reaction to failure so rather than it necessarily being about the context or well if I had all of the money in the world to make things perfect then none of this would happen that’s not where people’s minds went it was really how can I make sure that this is something that I can sit with and move on from and maybe fix or improve for myself or for others. Though we did have a few people who say it never feels safe and I get that there are lots of reasons why failure never really feels comfortable and safe it’s why we have it as a concept and why we’re all still talking about it today.

Now we’re kind of moving into the museum context this is more about the staff relationship here and so we asked people how do you support failing safely. Now this is again through many different contexts because for some people it’s how they support our students and teachers family community members who visit how do we support them to fail in the context of our programming. It could also be about your direct your direct employees and who you’re supervising or it could be your department and peer level but what we saw the of number one thing here was just that validation the acceptance that it’s okay I see that you tried especially acknowledging partial progress or advancement was something that that came up quite a bit. Reflection right there is one of the Mind of a maker dimensions that we were showing earlier. But from that validation I think the slightly less common but equally important category here is what I’ve called co-ownership and this is where we’re not necessarily going to fix it for you but we will be with you on that Journey we can be a sounding board we can give you advice on what to do so that you can go and make that happen.

We will collaborate we’ll be there to give feedback but it’s still something that you have the agency to improve upon and fix. Setting up a safe environment is also critical because I think it really has this amplifying effect for the other categories. Approaching people with empathy and with vulnerability helps form the trust and even the faith that they might go to bat for you if something has gone wrong having your back when talking to others is something that they can be really valuable as well.

And then the lower categories is where I think it’s interesting because inputs space and time we hear it all of the time you know if we could just have that grant that time all of these things that would change it these external factors and things like structures to just have it Milestones that’s what those check boxes represent here then we could just do. It seems to be much more about creating the environment in which we can explore and learn and find what’s going to work for us and for our specific experiences at least in in what our staff have said we don’t know that this is universal.

But I think that this starts to give us a direction that we can follow and so our final section of this survey was really about what can we be doing at Kid museum what is the ideas that you want to bring to the table here so what would make you more comfortable failing. And you can see that we we’ve posited a couple of these different ideas that we’ve talked about here today so some of it is just the time to plan experiment having set aside space in which to just do the work because that’s something that I think many of us who are wearing multiple hats in museums understand it there’s just more to do always and you don’t get a break.

But just about as popular we have time and space to share ideas with colleagues so having that that emotional and sort of work support from the people that you are on your team is also important. What didn’t test so well here is that that sharing of productive failures in team meetings so this is the opposite I think of the school that Adam was sharing for some people that’s a way to just be exposed and have to share what’s gone wrong. And that could speak to this this idea that Adam also shared of an error an error forgiving kind of context you know a failure that you can admit and discuss and that you will be supported in exploring is very different from one that you feel like you need to keep under wraps because your financial sustainability is at risk there or how you are perceived at work your ultimate goals within a career all of these different things make it a more and more complicated system.

So this I think really reinforces some of the ideas that we’ve seen here but this is still a work in progress and from these findings we’re going to now kind of think about ways that we can be bringing what we’ve seen here what we see as part of the situation and thinking about ways that we might be able to use this in our next steps. And what I’m going to talk about next are some Frameworks to think about ways you might be able to try out these changes and things that we are going to be doing as well.

So this was just put to our staff as the final kind of open-ended questions of the survey what could we try what should we try and sharing our stories and being vulnerable so that we can form that kind of bond and Trust was something that came out a lot. And I have to say that when I was reading all of these open-ended responses I was really overwhelmed in a positive way by the cander that some of some of my teammates had and this it was an anonymous survey but they were trusting enough to really talk about times of failure in their lives and experiences. Things that really had huge impacts on them and hurt and they were ready to ready to Spill and talk about it and I think that that destigmatization of failure is something that is coming out even in in the recognition here just in a in a brief survey we did online and it’s a big part of why we’re all in this room talking about it right now.

The other pieces that we saw were defining what failure and success looks like so as we kind of think about the implications here in a moment having a success condition having a sample notebook or knowing what is acceptable within a margin of success not just there is failure there is success there is no in between not not the the Yoda there you know the there is no try not necessarily setting ourselves up with that and really being open to thinking about progress as incremental and something that we will build over time.

I think that these are do we still have that one slide in there I might be completely misremembering it now but one way that we can we can think about this as well is within another context of Improvement science and before we get into some of these other means of thinking about it I think we’re going to talk a little bit more here about the ideas that can help and at this point I’m gonna hand it back over to you is that.

Adam I will in a moment once I get my bearings back okay …

Adam Maltese: Yeah I sorry I know that this is the way that sessions go I always feel like as a teacher that I should say like are there questions are there things you want to talk about. Yeah let me let me do that where are we okay I guess we’ll keep going sorry I’m failing at at time management here failure. Yeah so I will try to well I promise to go through these much faster than I did the background work so you know one of the things is as Cat was just talking there we had in our meetings prepping for this right we sort of had some times where we could laugh where we were saying yeah you know not that I look at a lot of annual reports from museums but pretty sure there’s not many or any annual reports out there that are like we tried seven things last year and four of them failed you know but we’re going to keep going and three of them were successful. Right my sense is that those are the things that get swept under the rug and then you just say well we tried three things right and they all succeeded and that’s great so thinking about again how that can be supported.

The other piece was in the little bit that I’ve ever interacted with museums around exhibit production right how it’s always just probably like a Broadway show or anything else of almost everything happens at the end right like. Not exactly but that that there’s that we work better as humans under this time pressure but that often what we saw particularly in kids in making was when you put that time pressure on your parents are coming in in an hour and they need to see this. It really ramped up the likelihood that they were going to have an emotional response like freak out because things were not working so the top one here is just this idea of if you can minimize those external constraints that are often maybe arbitrary or somewhat meaningless.

The more you can minimize some of those the more likely it is that people can sort of grapple with like that didn’t work well today but you know what it’s good thing we got started early because we still have you a couple weeks before this has to go live or something like that so thinking about that.

The second one here is help support problem solving and investigation but don’t overdo it this basically means don’t solve the problem for the people if you solve their problem and you do this all the time they will not grow. So you depending on where you are in the organization have to find the right level of support and you’ll probably get that wrong at least some of the times but hopefully you you’ll you yourself will learn what is that right level for this person what’s the right level for this other person or this other team. So that they are going back they know they’ve that you know you’re not going to whatever fire them because they’re having this challenge. But also not fixing it for them you are there to support them but you sort of want them to take the initiative to do it themselves and that they’ll be they’ll sort of learn from that and gain from that.

The final one is normalize failure but make space for emotional responses so you know we’ve got failure mugs on our team I actually have a failure mug that has a broken piece to it which works well my other colleague has a failure mug where the label after washing it in the dishwasher for a number of years like the labels come off right. So to normalize it have shirts about it have celebrations about it one of the papers that I put up in the folder was about BMW and how for a while they celebrated failures and things that didn’t work and how it led to a lot more creativity in some of the team. But you can’t I think the second part of this is you can’t just say like in such a way that’s like oh don’t worry about it you know you shouldn’t have that emotional response don’t worry about it failure’s okay you got to give space for that too because again you don’t know exactly all the all the contextual stuff that’s going on for that person in the moment.

And then if we can go on I think there those there a few more from the same list oh okay thank you just looks same.

Yeah the ideas of iteration visioning and continued learning right that if we think of things and I just worked with a colleague on a paper for people who do what I do but thinking about teachers as designers. Right and if you approach it as design of you’re not going to get it right you’re not going to get everything right the first time you do it but if you think about it as well I’ll get some of it right this time and then I’ll learn from that and then the next time maybe I can get some of those other things right we can improve these things that that’s probably a healthier way to think of it of improving over time.

Getting people to try to think about the prediction of and reflection on failures not easy but if you can you know as you’re talking about a plan say okay I need your education team to come to me with five ways you think that this is a bad idea or it’s going to fail or it’s not going to work for all Learners or we’re leaving you know different community members out of this or whatever it is that’s going to start getting them in that mindset of sort of Forward Thinking and seeing where there might be issues roadblocks challenges before they come.

And Analise left but that’s part of what we were talking about before that she’s often thinking about with her team is trying to like get that onto them it’s almost like speeding them up to gain that experience as a seasoned educator but at an earlier stage. And then reflecting on again not just sweeping it under the rug saying go home have a weekend forget about it thinking what can we learn from that right and and not that everything needs to be turned into a like let’s sit down and reflect on every little thing that went wrong but having some of that I think can be key and making that that a regular part of the process.

And then communication as we were talking about this as well I would say communication came seems to be one of the biggest things here of the person in the moment having this struggle and feeling like they can communicate with somebody about what’s challenging them or like what they think right if they’re predicting what they think they see we talked about some scenarios of you can sort of fear the person maybe who is your team lead and think like oh my gosh I can’t share this with them like they’re going to come down on me hard for this. But at the same time I don’t think it’s too crazy to think that if if you really care about them and think highly of them you might not want to disappoint them right so you similarly might not want to share when things are not going well but often if you can let somebody know with enough Advanced time I don’t have the resources or I’m just you’re asking me to do like right now I can’t do this right or there’s too much going on outside of work I can’t keep my head around this whatever that open channel of communication and feeling like people can share freely is more likely going to lead to minimization of those sort of dramatic failures then when people are trying to bottle it up and feel like they have to do all of this because everyone’s depending on them.

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This recording is generously supported by The Wallace Foundation.