courage – Patrick Mayfield

My wife and I are working our way through seasons 1 and 2 of the TV drama series Madam Secretary. In the episode we just watched, a compromising photograph of the heroine’s young adult daughter, Stevie, has been leaked.

[Spoiler alert!]

Very quickly, the photograph is traced to a former secret serviceman who is now in custody. Mother and Father visit him and leave the culprit being interviewed by their daughter, Stevie. She obviously asks him why he did it. The man is crestfallen, not justifying his actions, but explaining how it was revenge on his government employer who had sacked him.

Stevie goes on to ask the man about his life and he, full of defensive suspicion, asks her why she wants to know.

“Because,” she replies, “I don’t want to define you for the rest of my life by one stupid act.”

Demonising the enemy

It is a well-established psychological phenomenon that soldiers find it easier to kill their enemy in battle if they dehumanise them if they don’t allow themselves to consider that the person in the crosshairs of their gunsight maybe has a partner and children. Hatred further dehumanises the enemy, whoever they are. Distance, not meeting face-to-face with people, not returning their calls, also helps us to dehumanise someone. And we do this all the time in political debate and in business struggles, as well as in physical battle.

I don’t want to define you for the rest of my life by one stupid act.
Stevie McCord, in Madam Secretary
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Furthermore, repeated misinterpretation of actions and behaviour can build an almost-unassailable myth about the person we hate. We rehearse our version of their motives again and again until that myth takes on the diabolical appearance of an undeniable truth in our mind, whatever the facts may be.

Doing the opposite

If demonising our enemy is easy, humanising them is much harder. It needs to be more considered and courageous. Facing our enemy, and asking them questions is sometimes the only way if we ourselves are not to be enslaved to hatred and to its deeper cousin, fear.

So, in almost-hostile relationships at work, I always advocate a courageous stepping towards the enemy first. We may not want to do it. We would rather indulge ourselves in self-righteous hatred.

It takes courage and maturity to be more Stevie.

Failure is not an option.

No, it’s inevitable.

The issue is, first, will I accept that reality? Then can I act so that when I do fail, it is cheap and useful? When I do fail I do not do something worse: take failure as my identity. No, I am not a failure, but I do fail. The question is, did I learn from that failure?

Failure is not an option… it’s inevitable. So, get on with it.

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Time was when we would develop methodologies that tried to avoid failure altogether. I now realise that this attempt was impossible and even dangerous. The way it was typically evidenced in project management was to start further and further back in design:

“We need a plan first.” (This seems like good sense, doesn’t it?)
“Well, we need a business case first.” (Of course, who would argue with that; I wouldn’t.)
“Yes but before that, we need a Project Brief.”
“Yes, but before that, we need a Project Mandate.”
“OK, but before that, we need some Strategic Objectives.”
“Yes, but first we need our Vision, Mission and Values.”

We can carry this seemingly-rational nonsense on for as long as we wish – many consultants and business gurus do just that.
Confession time: I own up to having done that as well.
I have repented!

I sometimes think we have created a sort of management Catch 22, where we never achieve anything substantive because of a fear of failure.

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I sometimes think we have created a management Catch 22, where we never achieve anything substantive.Click to Tweet

But when do we do get around to doing something? Where is the execution?
“Oh, no. We’re not ready for that yet. What if we do the wrong thing or do it badly?”

I sometimes think we’ve created a kind of management Catch 22 where we go around and around in ever-decreasing circles, never achieving anything substantive. Fear of failure has become a sort of management political correctness. It’s time to face this demon.

Is failure always a bad thing? What if the worst failure of all is never achieving a return on our efforts. I believe this is a subtle and sophisticated paralysis by analysis.

The world is always more complex than our models.

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There are three challenges we need to face in breaking out of this syndrome:

The world is always more complex than our models. It is a world where there are unknowns. The unknowns prevent us from planning out all failure. Only as we experiment, execute, are we going to discover more about that complexity.
We often operate in a management culture of fear. Fear is always dangerous counsellor. Fear is a terrible strategy and a poor modus operandi. We need courage. With courage, we can devise small steps of execution where we are not betting the farm, but instead discovering more and learning from these unexpected results.
Failure can become personal. We can allow it to become our identity. This is a lie. I am not a failure, but I do fail. The question is: Do I learn enough from that failure and adapt?

I remember when I spoke alongside my friend and former colleague, Richard Rose, at an Agile Project Management conference. We found many there who were new to Agile. Others, by contrast, had been so long immersed in Agile practice that they had forgotten the real value of incremental, Just-Enough-Design-Up-Front management.

At one point I said, “Failure is not an option, it’s inevitable.” I saw lights go on all around the room.

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Those weary with traditional management that promised much but delivered little, and those immersed in newer, more empirical approaches both need to be aware of the value of limited failure. We hypothesise about this complex world, test, examine the results, adapt and move on. W.E. Deming had nailed this years ago in his PDCA cycle. See my earlier article on this: Ever-Increasing Circles.

We need an empirical humility about what will happen if we do such-and-such, test and then see if we are right.

Maybe we need a CTF, a Call To Failure.

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Marketers talk about the Call to Action, the CTA. Maybe we all need a CTF, a Call to Failure.

OK. So I have a question for you. How do you make sure you learn from a ‘failure’? I’m really interested. Please share your approach below. The rest of us would really value it!