Alex has a great post today on his Top 5 reasons to celebrate mistakes at work. I’ve been hearing lately from many clients about the need for us to loosen up and accept more failure in our work. The pressure that comes from perfection and maintaining a failsafe environment is a killer, and while we all demand high levels of accountability and performance, working in a climate where we can fail-safe provides more opportunity to find creative ways forward that are hitherto unknown. So to compliment Alex’s post, here are a few ways to create a safe-fail environment:
1. Be in a learning journey with others. While you are working with people, see your work as a learning journey and share questions and inquiries with your team.
2. Take time to reflect on successes and failures together. We are having a lovely conversation on the OSLIST, the Open Space facilitator’s listserv about failures right now and it’s refreshing to hear stories about where things went sideways. What we learn from those experiences is deep, both about ourselves and our work.
3. Be helpful. When a colleague takes a risk and fail, be prepared to setp up to help them sort it out. My best boss ever gave us three rules to operate under: be loyal to your team, make mistakes and make sure he was the first to know when you made one. There was almost nothing we could do that he couldn’t take care of, and we always had him at our backs, as long as he was the first to hear about it. Providing that support to team members is fantastic.
4. Apologize together. Show a united front, and help make amends when things go wrong. This is a take on one of the improv principles of making your partner look good. It is also about taking responsibility and having many minds and hearts to put to work to correct what needs correcting. This one matters when your mistake costs lives. Would be nice to see this more in the corporate world.
5. Build on the offer. Another improv principle, this one invites us to see what we just went through as an offer to move on to the next thing.
6. Don’t be hard on yourself. You can’t get out of a pickle if you are berating yourself up for being there. I find The Work of Byron Katie to be very very helpful in helping become clear about what to do next and to loosen up on the story that just because I failed, therefore I am a failure.
Now these little lessons work in complex environments, like human organizations, not mechanical systems so before you jump on me for having unrealistic expectation for airplanes and oil rigs, just know that. Having said that, dealing with the human costs of airplane crashes and oil rig explosions requires clarity, and being wrapped in blame and self-loathing is not the same as being empathetic and clear.
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Improv again last night here on Bowen Island. It is such a rich learning space for me in many ways. Last night, one of our group kept bringing scenes back to the Olympics, and especially the luge. At times it was funny but it became tiresome in other cases, and in an extended game of freeze tag, when he stepped in, everyone knew where the scene was going. My learning from that is what it looks like when we come to a situation prepared, with a pre-conceived idea of what will work, being attached to an offering, but insensitive to what is going on or worse, unable to co-create something new. In aikido the art of entering is known as irimi, and it is a powerful thing to learn. It is about entering from a place of essence rather than a place of having a desired effect.
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Sunday afternoon a small group of my neighbours here on Bowen Island gathered to inaugurate an improv group. All I had was a bunch of exercises culled from the web, some eager players and a space. And that was all we needed.
After a few warm ups, we got into some evxercises and then played a few scenes. At least half of the group of eight were experienced actors, several of whom were comfortable with the openness of the structure and others who struggled a little. It was cool to see us hit some real high points (especially during on exercise called ABC where you play a scene with the dialogue rotating through each actor, and each line starting with a subsequent letter of the alphabet. What I noticed was how comfortable we were in general with a little bit of order and then space inside that to play.
For me, in addition to playing, this is really an exercise in discovering chaordic structure in practice. What is the happy balance between a little form and a little space? What constraints give us freedom and how does too much openness oppress? It’s interesting to be in this space, listening carefully, struggling to find a way to advance the line, make an offer, build on what has gone before. This is fun, but HARD, and that is the delightful challenge of it.
We’re going to keep going Monday nights at Collins Hall on Bowen Island. If you are on island, some and play! Bring a game to offer, and come prepared to learn.
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Happy New Year!
Some random pickin’s from the feed:
- Psychology and Security Resource Page . Learn about FEELING afraid and FEELING safe.
- The Conferences that Work blog. Cool, even though it seems like he has reinvented Open Space.
- jack/zen blogs the 7 principles of improv.
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Just off the phone with a friend of mine, Jackie Minns. Jackis is a fabulous actor and yoga teacher and masseuse (I do live on a British columbia island you know!) and she and I have been scheming up some ideas to start an improvisational theatre group here on Bowen Island. Our first gathering will be on February 7 and so in doing some research I came across some great collections of improv games and exercises.
- Learnimprov.com has a great list and a random workshop generator.
- The Living Playbook is encyclopedic in nature and is the basis of the free iPhone app, iProv which also has a random generation feature..
- And speaking of improv encyclopedias, here is The Improv Encyclopedia.
- Fuzzy’s game list.
That should give us lots to do.