Just read an article on how the fear of failure is the greatest thing holding back innovation in the business world. One reads these kinds of articles all the time. The essence is that unless we can let go of fear or deal with our deep need to be in control at all times, innovation is stifled.
This is true of course, but I see few articles that talk about how fear of failure in built into the architecture of the organization.
We live in an expert driven culture. Kids raised in schools are taught at an early age that having the answer is everything. Children raise their hands and are given points for the correct answer. Marks and scores are awarded for success – failure gets you remedial help, often crushing dreams and passions at the same time.
In the post-school world, most people are hired in a job interview based on the answers they give. There are millions of words written on how to give a stellar job interview, to land the job of your dreams. It is has to do with giving the right answers.
And so it is no surprise in the organizational world that I see success as the the only way forward and failure as “not an option.” For leaders, embracing failure is almost too risky. Despite the management literature to the contrary, I see very few leaders willing to take the risk that something may fail. Sometimes the failure is wrapped in competence – it’s okay to fail, but not to have losses. In other words, don’t do something I can’t repair.
This is because few of these articles talk about some of the real politiks of organizational life. It’s not that I’m afraid to fail – it’s that I am afraid to lose my job. When there is a scarcity of political capital and credit in an organization, there are multiple games that are played to turn failure into a way to screw the other guy so I don’t lose my job. Blame is deflected, responsibility is assigned elsewhere, and sometimes people will take credit for taking the risk but will lie the failure at the feet of someone else. It’s relatively easy to play on the expert driven culture to advance your own causes at the expense of another’s failings.
The answer to this is for leaders to be engaged in changing the architecture of fear and failure in the organization. It means hiring people into their areas of stretch, not into their areas of core competence. It means embodying risk taking, and creating and maintaining a culture of risk and trust. A single betrayal destroys the fabric of a risk taking team.
I think that means going beyond simply having corporate pep rallies to celebrate failure, or giving incentives for the “best failed idea.” It goes to creating a culture of conversation and collective ownership for successes and failures. It means standing with each other and not advancing your own interests at the expense of something that was tried. It means deeply investigating on an ongoing basis the ways in which we hold each other accountable so that we may work with grace and support, to rush in to help when things go sideways instead of lobbing accusations from the sidelines.
Without changing the architecture of fear, embracing the fear of failure is impossible.
Here is a little diagram of the chaordic stepping stones mapped onto Sam Kaner’s Diamond of Participation. This is a pretty geeky Art of Hosting map, but essentially it describes the way planning unfolds in practice.
The chaordic stepping stones is a tool I use to do a lot of planning. These nine steps help us stay focused on need and purpose and design our structure and outcomes based on that. the first four steps of Need, Purpose, Principles and People are essential elements for the design of an invitation process. Getting clear on these steps helps us to generate purpose, questions and an opening for good participatory process to flow.
The next three steps of Concept, Limiting Beliefs and Structure help us to think about how we will organize ourselves to hold space for emergence. This becomes especially important in the Groan Zone, the place where a group is struggling with integration of ideas, diversity and creativity and where they feel lost and tired. Good process helps us to hold a group together through that struggle.
The last two steps, Practice and Harvest, help us to shape our outcomes, create a process for impact and create useful artifacts and documents of our learning process that can help others to continue the conversation.
The chaordic stepping stones are a design tool, meaning that we think through all of them at the outset of an initiative, and refine them as circumstances change. This diagram shows how they become active through the life of a process.
Yesterday I was giving a webinar and talking about some core Art of Hosting practices. We spent a while covering the four fold practice and then looked at the way in which various archetypal organizational paradigms play out in different organizational settings. I was trying to emphasize the idea of “practice” so that the participants would know that there is no right way of doing this work but rather the work itself is engaging in a constant practice, a constant searching for mastery.
Towards the end of the call a participant reflected that all of this was rather too much to take in all at once. She wondered aloud how she would be able to implement it all.
This is a common problem with learning, I find. Somewhere along the line many people imagine that being in a learning situation – a class, a course, a webinar or so on – means that they will receive a direct transfer of skill which they can then go and apply. While there are some kinds of learning that work like this, most learning, especially as it applies to leadership or facilitation is rather an invitation to practice, meaning that you begin and develop a competence over your craft in application.
So how to begin?
The advice I gave our participant yesterday was to begin by noticing first of all. Take two weeks and notice where the four fold practice appears in your own life, what you do unconsciously to become present, to participate in conversation, to host space and to co-create. Make a list of places whee you do this and notice how you do this. Raise your own natural practice to the level of conscious practice so that you can use that as a basis to extend it in new ways.
Beginning a learning journey helps to set a learning cycle into practice. It starts with noticing, with acting and then with reflecting before repeating again. I sometimes think that beyond any particular skill that can be learned, the skill of active reflective learning is perhaps the most important. It is how we create a learning journey for ourselves that has the possibility of taking us to mastery.
My friend Ginny Belden-Charles told me a great story today. She was working in Detroit on some community development issues with a number of activists and others. Their focus was on empowering community development and social action and creating the kinds of citizen based responses that Detroit needs, and she was invited to come and host a circle.
When Ginny arrived in her circle of folks, she was amazed at the presence of the famous revolutionary activist Grace Lee Boggs. Grace Lee Boggs is an institution in social activist circles and at 96 years old, with 70 years of practice under her bel, she is an elder in the world of social activism, and is dedicated to the long waves of social change.
Ginny reported on how in awe she was of being able to sit in a circle with this important persona and how she was looking forward to learning some of her wisdom. So when she asked Grace to begin the circle, she was eager to hear what this Elder might say.
To Ginny’s surprise, Grace turned to Ginny and said: “So why don’t you tell us tell us your story…what have you learned?”
I think you must get awfully smart by engaging in that strategy for 96 years.
This is an estuary. It is the place where a river goes to die. Everything the river has ever been and everything it has carried within it, is deposited at it’s mouth where the flow slows down and the water merges with the ocean. These are places of incredible calm and richness, but they lack the exciting flow of the torrents and waterfalls and cascades of the upper river system.
Yesterday I was speaking with a client who worried that an initiative we had begun together was heading towards the estuary of action – a long term visioning processes where lots of things are said and very little is done. “We’ve done that before,” she said. Nobody likes that. I wracked my brain to see where it was that I had led this group to believe that this is what we were doing. We had done a World Cafe to check into some possibilities for the organization and we had done a short Open Space to initiatie some experimental actions. We had learned a little about the organization from these two gatherings, and we were, at least in my mind, fully entered into a participatory action learning cycle, working with emergent ideas, within several well established constraints. I was surprised to hear the fear spoken that what we were doing was “visioning.”
Then I realized that what we were dealing with was an entrained pattern. People within this organization associated dialogue with visioning, and the results of dialogue with a mass of post-it notes and flip charts that never get typed up, and action that never comes of it. Likewise, it turns out that the associated planning with a process that begins with a vision, and then costs out a plan and takes that plan to a decision making body which then rules on whether the project can proceed, by allocating resources. Both of these views are old thinking, rigid patterns that lock participants in a linear view of action that looks like this:
The truth is that I had been viewing the process as an action learning cycle:


So now that we are a little clearer on this, there was a distinct relaxation among the group. We are heading into some uncharted territory and it is too early to nail down concrete plans about what to do and likewise simply visioning doesn’t take us anywhere either. Instead, we are harvesting some of the rich sense of community that exists, opening some space for a little leadership, inviting passion and responsibility and making small starts, The small starts are confirming some of what we suspected about how the organization works, which is good news, because we are developing a pattern of action together that will help us all as we move forward to do bigger things with more extensive resource implications. This is the proper role of vision and planning in emergent and participatory processes – gentle, developmental, reflective and active.