I wanted to share.
Author: Adam Kahane
Strategy + business blog Nov 20, 2018
Three years ago, my colleagues and I began an ambitious project to strengthen the rule of law in Mexico. To find ways to address this complex challenge, our local partners convened a group of senior leaders with radically different perspectives — politicians, judges, journalists, activists, academics, police, and clergy members. For the group’s first meeting, my team painstakingly designed a cutting-edge process for how to work together. But some of the participants found it confusing and frustrating, and by the end of the second day we had to completely rework it. One of our local partners was furious and accused us of not knowing what we were doing — of “improvising.” The meeting ended well enough, but it took us weeks to get the project and our partnership back on track.
This pattern was repeated many times as the project progressed. We would have a plan for what to do, some aspects of the plan wouldn’t work, and we would have to change it, sometimes wrenchingly. Even though most of the participants now view the project as a success and are continuing to broaden and deepen it, it hasn’t turned out the way we had all hoped, expected, or intended. In this sense, we failed.
All of my firm’s projects bring together diverse teams to try to make progress on complex and contentious public issues. No single party controls the outcome, and we can’t know in advance what will work, so things often unfold differently than planned. Through these experiences, I’ve come to view unexpected results not as a problem but as a spur for the learning and adaptation we need to do. Improvisation, therefore, is a sign not of failure, but of success. There are structured ways to improvise, though, that will help ensure big bumps in the road don’t throw you completely off course.
How to Fail the Right Way
Look forward, not backward. You may not always do things right the first time, but you should be intent on learning from what happened and doing better next time. At the end of every unit of my work — every quarter, project phase, or workshop day — the team sits down for a “plus/delta” meeting in which everyone gives an answer to two questions about themselves, their colleagues, and the whole team:
- Plus: “What did I/you/we do well that I/you/we need to keep doing?”
- Delta (the mathematical symbol for change): “What do I/you/we need to do better next time?”
We did this at the end of the second day of the meeting in Mexico, and it’s how we discovered a new and better way forward.
I’ve come to view unexpected results not as a problem but as a spur for the learning and adaptation we need to do.
Take measured risks. When working on complex challenges, you’ll need to try doing new things (new offerings) and doing old things in new ways (new processes). But this risk-taking has to be prudent. At my firm, new team members must have the diligence and humility to learn the established way of handling a problem before they invent a new way. We try small experiments in safe contexts (tweaking established offerings and processes with trusting and trusted partners) before trying big experiments in dangerous contexts. In Mexico, for instance, although the work involved a unique situation and lots of trial and error, a foundation of decades of relevant experience enabled us to advance. You can improvise well only if you have practiced a lot.
Ask for feedback. On the second evening of the rule-of-law project meeting in Mexico, I thought things were going well, but some of my colleagues knew they weren’t and so insisted that we sit down, listen carefully to the participants and one another, and work out what to do next. Often, you can’t rely only on your own perspective. Ask for feedback: from your colleagues, clients, and anyone else involved with the problem you’re trying to solve. Ask casually and formally, verbally and in writing, and with specific and open-ended questions. And share all of this feedback with everyone on the team so you can make grounded individual and collective decisions about what to do next.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.