Publish at May 01 2017 Updated October 26 2023
"Celebrate your failures" takes us back to the fertile thinking of Watzlawick and his book " How to succeed at failing ", one of the founding members of the " Palo Alto School ", particularly known for its exploration of systemic approaches and, in so doing, paradoxical injunctions.
Many companies and administrations refuse to make progress by following implicit directives such as "no waves", "I only want to feel positive vibrations", but by sweeping under the carpet everything that's annoying, do we actually manage to learn?
Indeed, omitting iterations, trial-and-error cycles or feedback from an organizational learning strategy condemns the organization to making its problems its solutions, because it would be worse to imagine changing than to try to move the lines.
However, it is possible to approach the world of business and administration in a less serious way than the "every mistake must be punished" mode, on pain of producing fearful individuals, hiding the slightest error and lacking in creativity, tetanized as they are by the idea of taking the slightest risk.
The seminar on celebrating failure could be a tool to deflect and de-dramatize the incidents and mishaps that are bound to crop up in any normal organization, alive with events and hazards. If people experience failure, it's because they have to make choices and decisions.
Failure can be seen as a state in which one has not yet succeeded. In a world described by the US military as VUCA Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous, learning from failure may well be the best coping strategy. In fact, it's the only one we've ever followed, but it's so repressed in the school system that the hunt for mistakes continues in organizations, putting careers and even jobs at risk.
"Celebrating one's failures" has a religious connotation, with celebration being a form of welcoming the divine, something greater than oneself that runs through us but from which we are strangers (Phew! It's not us!). Failure made inaccessible and external to oneself could worry rationalists, who prefer to "learn from mistakes". In this case, it's all about finding the causes. A number of tools are available, such as the Ishikawa diagram, V-cycle project team feedback, or tools derived from quality approaches.
The " failed camp " is the opposite ofappreciative inquiry: it's all about getting together and learning as a group, in a friendly and relaxed way, about your best flops. Everyone is free to come and tell the others about their failures, not to make excuses or glorify themselves, but to ensure that everyone benefits from the lesson.
In his book " Les décisions absurdes ", Christian Morel shows how air safety has progressed by accepting the guilt-free expression of bad decisions. The self-compassion afforded by collective expression allows everyone to continue taking risks. Expression avoids the retraction of attitudes to unknown outcomes. You can learn to fail successfully, by listening more carefully to your own experience and giving new meaning to your failures. Doing it together and sharing it is a lesson, as in this exciting example from a communications agency. To be able to express failures positively in public and turn them into an act of learning requires a level of trust between members and a dissociation between individual success and reward, failing which the learning process is doomed to failure. This is what the culture of agile methods is all about.
Agile methods have now been added to the quality toolbox. In the spirit of rapid prototyping, it's all about moving fast, seeing how the social body reacts to proposed concepts or drafts of products, services or software, and then rectifying very quickly. The Internet can help us to test new ideas quickly, for example bycrowdtesting potential users online, where adjustments are made more quickly, less expensively and with fewer consequences. The agile manifesto leads us to value :
Agile methods involve a series of production sprints, planned, reviewed and looked back on to correct or abandon, and in all cases to learn.
In this culture, the celebration of failures takes on a different meaning from that in hierarchical pyramidal organizations, where a priori control predominates. This learning culture, which is developing in agile IT projects, could well find its way into more traditional organizations, and challenge the foundations of control authority.
Organizing a seminar to celebrate failures will be a marker of transition for organizations. It allows us to enter more serenely and accelerate the trial-and-error cycle sought by learning organizations.
Illustration : Spirit Bunny - Pixabay
Source: Wikipedia
Wikipedia - Watzlawick How to succeed at failure
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comment_r%C3%A9ussir_%C3%A0_%C3%A9chouer
How to deploy an anti-VUCA strategy - Les echos - https://www.lesechos.fr/idees-debats/cercle/cercle-166536-comment-deployer-une-strategie-anti-vuca-2066639.php
MOREL, C. (2002), Les décisions absurdes. Paris: Gallimard. http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Bibliotheque-des-Sciences-humaines/Les-decisions-absurdes
Appreciative inquiry - 50 questions to change pedagogy http://cursus.edu/article/26757/appreciative-inquiry-50-questions-pour-changer/
Celebrating failure - Kedge - Learning together https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnk_9cP3oP0&list=PLHu_bK2gNpzDHRx64hFQAL2412GuHOWZx&index=61
So sample what is crowdtesting? http://www.so-sample.com/qu-est-ce-que-le-crowdtesting
Agilist - Agile methods http://www.agiliste.fr/introduction-methodes-agiles/
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