Early on in the crisis, our daughter cared a lot about learning online. However, as time has passed, this interest has dwindled. Although this has been difficult, it has has also highlighted the importance of a space to fail in order to learn.
Tag: Failure
Sideways indicates that the situation is different than planned. It describes a tense situation in which a breakdown occurs, and there is the potential for chaos. There is the need to restore some sense of order, or normalcy.
In today’s world of growth sizes and testing regimes, it can be so easy to lock ourselves into a sense of regular and normal. I remember the school I was at a few years ago grew by 200+ students overnight. It was the middle of Term two. I was in charge of recreating the timetable overnight (literally) and totally adjusting my classes. The current scenario far exceeds this, but what I like about your post Ian was the importance of self care first and fore-mostly:
After you have focused on health & safety, move on to the remaining points.
This can come in many forms. Mental duress. Anxiety. Illness.
I also like Sean Michael Morris’ focus on kindness.
Technology will always let you down, the sooner you are okay with that, and can keep juggling, the better. It took me a while to get to this place, I lived in fear of the FAIL.
Organisations fail for a broad range of reasons, but rarely for no reason at all. I found myself thinking about a taxonomy of failure: unless we deem failure to be the action of idiots and fools, we must be open to the idea that we too may fail. Paralysed or deceived by the same forces that have levelled so many other seemingly unassailable entities. So understanding modes of failure could prove to be a useful exercise in both innovation, and change: to provide the impetus to start, and the insight to succeed.
Julian Stodd attempts to identify different reasons failure may occur. This is list is a useful provocation when thinking about where something may have gone wrong and what the next iteration may be.
In an interview with Kara Swisher for Recode Decode, Adam Grant explains why company cultures are far from unique. He touches on a few key idea:
- Fail Fast: Failure (and product) is not what matters, instead we should be focusing on processes.
- Culture Fit: The right mix is not about being less cohesive as an organisation, but rather more open to diversity.
- Givers: We need more givers. However givers require a culture to prosper. There needs to be a ‘culture of asking’ and a move to weed out the takers.
Overall, success is about contributing and helping others succeed. This is addressed in Grant’s TED Talk.
As a side note, one of the interesting points discussed during the TED Talk was that of the ‘agreeable taker’:
The other combination we forget about is the deadly one — the agreeable taker, also known as the faker. This is the person who’s nice to your face, and then will stab you right in the back. And my favorite way to catch these people in the interview process is to ask the question, “Can you give me the names of four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved?” The takers will give you four names, and they will all be more influential than them, because takers are great at kissing up and then kicking down. Givers are more likely to name people who are below them in a hierarchy, who don’t have as much power, who can do them no good. And let’s face it, you all know you can learn a lot about character by watching how someone treats their restaurant server or their Uber driver.
via Doug Belshaw