Failing your way to success
4th August 2006 by Carol Kinsey Goman
In a recent television interview, Whoopie Goldberg described how she got her first one-woman show in New York: Whoopie was performing her nightclub act and (the director) Mike Nichols was in the audience. He came backstage and offered to create a show for her in a Broadway theater. Whoopie said she didn’t know if that was such a good idea. What if she were lousy? Mike asked if she’d ever been lousy before and Whoopie said “Sure!” His response was, “Then it’s no big deal. You’ll just be lousy on Broadway.”
To me, that reply was brilliant!
Fear of failure is one of the biggest obstacles to success. Yet every major achievement is preceded by many failures.
“Failure is not a crime. Failure to learn from failure is,” said Walter Wriston, the former chairman of CitiCorp. But it can be difficult for people in an organization to have a genuine discussion about failure that doesn’t include blame or rationalization. To facilitate this kind of productive conversation, the United States Army developed the After Action Reviews. AARs are now used by organizations around the world to help employees learn from their mistakes, prevent future errors, and find new solutions to problems.
Basically, the AAR process assembles people who were involved in a planned project or event and asks them to answer these questions:
1. What was the desired outcome?
2. What was the actual outcome?
3. Why were there differences between what we wanted and what we achieved?
4. What did we learn? (What would we do differently next time?)
What about your communication strategies? Had any good failures lately?
August 8th, 2006 at 5:58 am
I like the four questions, but…
The posting suggests that “communication” is a project, not an on-going process.
So, yeah, if you (the royal you, not Carol or the army specifically) think that communications is a sampling project with a dozen fresh-faced teens at each of 27 summer fairs and special events, heading out half-portion bottles of Lime-Flavo(u)red cola, you can think of what you’d do differently next summer, when the flavo(u)r injection is orange.
But what if the “communications” is on-going, like, for instance, this blog?
The IABC board members could each answer the first three questions, type them up and post them here. After all, this blog has huge potential to involve 13,500 people around the world. And then, where all the members have posted responses to 1,2 and 3, they could then tackle Q4.
About Q 1: We need the board to answer Q1 cuz I don’t know the desired outcome of creating this. I think that having one in five IABC members scan through the five sections every two weeks would be a good desired outcome. But when this project was started, was the goal one in five, or one in five hundred?
And one posting comment per section (not necessarily per original message)by X% of members, every two weeks, would be a good target outcome. But what is X?
One percent would be 135 postings, leaving ninety-nine out of one hundred to be shy, or on holidays, or recently deceased.
About Q 2: There’s no easy way a board member couild determine visits. Some IABC technican would have to report the visits, but that’s easy to do.
But the board members can count the responses posted, and do the math on that.
About Q3: This would be fascinating. First, of course, the board members would have to see if there is a gap between Q 1 and Q 2.
Maybe, in return for the $300 a year or so members pay, the results of Q2 meet the objectives of Q1.
Is Q1 and Q 2 match, great. But study can still be done, with the objective of changing the value of X.
If not…
Is it promotion? Do members not own computers? Do members not care about the profession? Are communicators shy? Is there a huge cultural difference, with Canadians either much more willing to share ideas or less shy or so bored they having nothing better to do than comment here? Is the blog badly designed? ? ? ?
About Q4: No need to think about “next time.” What would the board members recommend doing for this on-going process?
——
I’m curious how many board members have read anything in the Commons since July 20.
BAK
August 21st, 2006 at 1:50 pm
Every kid who’s learned how to ride a bike knows the truth in the old Chinese adage:
“Fall down seven times, get up eight.”
August 22nd, 2006 at 2:24 am
Of course communication is a process, a journey, sometimes iterative, always enlightening. But not every organisation is culturally ready for the adult to adult discussions that Carol suggests. That’s where we need to get to, but in the organisations that are still cynical, disenfranchised, or disconnected; you get one chance to make a first impression, and it’s got to be right because it will last.