Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction 00:02:23: Failure is an emotional challenge 00:03:15: Fundamental Attribution Error 00:06:18: The tendency to fail on repeat 00:07:31: Winner effect vs failure effect 00:09:54: Examples of failure from Helen and Sarah 00:17:07: How to pre-empt failure… 00:17:28: … 1: do project premortems 00:20:05: … 2: use failure critics 00:23:09: … 3: learn from other people's failures 00:24:32: Different types of failure and how to respond to them… 00:25:17: … 1: foolish failure 00:23:56: … 2: fixable failure 00:34:41: … 3: uncertain future 00:38:00: … 4: deliberate fact-finding failure 00:42:00: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: Hi, I'm Helen. Sarah Ellis: And I'm Sarah. Helen Tupper: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly show where we talk about something to do with work, it could be anything, but it's designed to help you to navigate your career, the ups, the downs, the ins, the outs, to give you some skills and support to work your way through whatever is happening at the moment. If you would like some support beyond the podcast, we've got lots of things for you.  So, we have a weekly free session called PodPlus, where you can connect with likeminded listeners, who like talking about this stuff a little bit more, and we dive deeper into the topic, which today is about failure; more on that in a second.  You can also sign up for PodMail.  It's a weekly email that has all of our PodSheets in it and all of our PodNotes in there; so, swipeable summaries, editable tools, that you can fill out so you can learn a bit more from what you might be listening to.  All of that stuff is in the show notes.  And if you ever can't find it, you can always email us.  We're helen&sarah@squigglycareers.com. But today, our topic is how you move forward from failure. Sarah Ellis: I always think our topics do reflect a little bit what's going on in our lives at the moment! Helen Tupper: Hello!  What shall we talk about this week?  What's an up and down and in and out that we're struggling with?! Sarah Ellis: So, more generally, outside of Helen's and my world, why moving forward with failure in a Squiggly Career?  Well, I was thinking about this, and I do feel like, within a Squiggly Career, failure is even more inevitable probably than it has been before, which might sound a bit demotivating; but I don't think the question anymore is, "Will you fail?" or, "How do I stop myself from failing?" it's more, "When you fail, how do you respond?" and that's why we've called it "moving forward". I think that's because we're all developing in different directions, all of that unlearning and relearning, being a beginner, all of the uncertainty and change.  I think everything around us, almost our context, has increased the chances of frequent failure.  But the more you read about this, the more you realise that often, it's our relationship with failure, and it's how we respond that makes a really big difference. So, it happens to all of us and it happens to best of us, but today we're going to really try and help you with not only why is it hard, and perhaps some of the mindset that might help us just to navigate failure, but also some ideas for action as always, to hopefully give you some practical tools and tips so that when this does happen, we can just be a bit smarter about learning and progressing. Helen Tupper: I think we do need the practical tools and tips, because when you look into learning from your failure, moving on from your failure, there are a few issues why people find it hard.  I think the first one's quite obvious, which is that it feels a bit uncomfortable, so a bit like an emotional challenge really, that you've got to accept that something has not gone the way you wanted it to, that you have failed in some way; and I feel like failure is quite an emotive word. Then, as well as that self-awareness and acceptance, you've then got to think about, what might you do differently?  It's quite a lot of processes, I think, going on in your head, which are quite objective, and the thing actually might be quite emotional.  When I think about my failures, it feels really hard in the moment, because most of the time you're wishing it hadn't happened, let alone having the clarity to think, "How did I contribute to this situation?  What might I do differently?" But I was really just emotional as well, when I was researching like, "Why is this so hard?  Why am I finding this so hard?"  This thing came up I had to look up quite a lot, because I was like, "What does this mean?"  Fundamental Attribution Error; see what you think about this, Sarah.  It's like a cognitive trap that we all have, which is where when something goes wrong, when it goes wrong to us, we often look at all the factors that contribute to it. So, let's say I have failed.  I'll tell you one last week, this is really bad!  I failed to arrive for a meeting, okay; I failed to arrive for a meeting because, well this is the point, with fundamental attribution error, you make loads of reasons why you failed.  So, there wasn't enough detail in the diary, the invite changed; so, you basically look at other factors that contribute to the failure.  But if you had missed the meeting, what we do apparently as humans is I say, "Oh, Sarah always misses meetings.  Sarah isn't an organised person". So, if you fail, apparently we make it about someone else's identity, so we connect the failure to the person; but if we fail, we connect our failure to factors outside of us.  So, if you believe that to be true, and it's apparently a thing, it's one of the reasons why learning from and reflecting on our failures can be hard, because we're not necessarily looking inside ourselves automatically for the reasons, we are looking at the factors outside of us, and almost pointing the finger at the factors, rather than looking internal at how we might have contributed to it. Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I find that interesting, because I wonder if that is coping.  I wonder if that is a coping strategy to help us to not feel as awful about failing, or when something's gone wrong, because often we are our own worse critics.  But it almost feels like when it comes to failure, it's almost so hard, it's such a tough time, that to be able to find our way through it, maybe we have to try and make it not about us. Helen Tupper: It's not nice, is it?  I mean, it's quite defensive, "Oh, it wasn't me, it was all these things".  It's not that nice that for other people we're like, "Oh, you're awful", but for me it's just these other factors.  It's not this lovely cognitive thing that's going on there! Sarah Ellis: Well, yeah, and you start to read, I was looking at some of the relationships we have with failure, like what do we think?  When we think failure, what does it equal?  And one of them, when you start to read a lot about this, is this thing of the blame game.  So, failure equals fault.  So we get to, "Yeah, some of it might be our fault", but exactly as Helen just described, "Well, who else's fault could it be?" or, "What else's fault might it be?" Also, I think when we think about fail, we sort of go "failure".  And whilst failure isn't fun, we often don't have a positive outcome from failure.  So, you know we talked about, "We're going to fail more, we're going to fail frequently", and again rationally we probably all know that's true; but our first thought, because imagine how hard it must be to do this, because I can't ever imagine doing it so far, our first thought is not, "When I fail, I've never failed to learn" or, "What can I learn?"  That's not usually the first thing that pops into our head, because we're probably so busy coping in that moment. It is fascinating, because I did read this and I started to then recognise it, that we fail on repeat.  So, our brains aren't that good at learning from failure.  So, initially I was thinking, "When you fail, then you learn from it, so then hopefully you don't fail in the same way again".  But from some of this really interesting research, albeit some of it has been done with monkeys, when I was reading about it, is that you fail and then you keep failing in the same way, because failure basically throws us off course; it makes failure even more likely sometimes. Then, when we fail again, we actually fail sometimes even worse.  Almost in the same context, in the same situation, something fails, it happens again, we're actually more likely to keep on failing and then for it to feel even harder, which I was like, "That feels really hard!"  But then, when I started to think really practically about some of the week-to-week failures that maybe I have, or patterns that you start to spot, you do realise, "I do fail in some of the same ways on repeat", and that is actually really frustrating.  I think I get quite frustrated when I think about that.  But that's because our brain is not doing a good job of helping us to learn. So, they talk about the difference between the winner effect and basically, the failure effect.  So, the winner effect is, "Success breeds success"; but unfortunately, failure can also breed failure.  So, what we have got to do is we've got to break that cycle, and it is completely breakable.  You can fix how you respond and reframe failure.  But I do think it's sometimes worth knowing that that's maybe on autopilot, or automatically what might be happening, because that wasn't something that I'd understood before I'd done some reading and thinking prior to today. Helen Tupper: I think it's really interesting and a bit scary, but does make you think, "Okay, that's even more of a reason to press pause when you fail", because the risk if you don't, you're just going to keep failing perhaps in different ways, but around the same area. I feel like you can't really talk about failure without referencing Elizabeth Day, who was owned in more recent times the area of failure, and how to fail and learn from it.  And there's a lovely quote from Failosophy, her book on failure, second book on failure, which says that, "If we are able, as much as possible, to remove both fear and ego when we encounter crisis, we will see failure more clearly for what it is; not as something that defines us, but as a missing piece of knowledge that helps us come closer to completing the jigsaw puzzle of who we truly are". I mean, it's very eloquent, I feel like Elizabeth Day's very eloquent, but I think it's your point where you said, "Fail equals failure", like it becomes our identity; I think her point there is that it's not something that defines you, it's just an opportunity for a bit of knowledge about ourselves, a bit of learning about what we might do differently next time.  And I think the more that we can reframe failure as that, rather than it becomes our identity, the better it is for us to do something different going forward. Sarah Ellis: So, before we dive into our ideas for action, shall we share a few failures of our own? Helen Tupper: So, you want a cathartic moment on the podcast?! Sarah Ellis: I don't know about that!  To be honest, I don't really like talking about them or thinking about them that much.  I don't want to go back and reexplore all the ways how I failed; albeit I get that that's a useful process and exactly what Elizabeth Day actually does with her guests on her podcast.  But when you're doing this, it is quite confronting, isn't it?  It's probably why, exactly as we've said before, that your failure does throw us off course, because we don't really want to spend time thinking about it, but also why it's so useful to do that.  So, do you want to go first?! Helen Tupper: Thanks for that!  I'll go with one that I think I've shared before on the podcast, because it's so memorable to me.  A while ago, when I was at Capital One, and I was managing a credit card project, I won't go into the detail of it too much, but basically consolidating lots of different credit cards; and I wasn't close to the detail, but I was sort of leading the project, which is a bad thing to do.  And, I sort of assumed that everybody else had covered certain things, and it hadn't been done, and basically this project went live and it was quite a big failure on the first day, because quite a lot of credit cards got disrupted and had to be cancelled. I mean, I'm really minimising the failure, because it wasn't very good and lots of people were involved in trying to sort it out, and it was really scary and horrible!  But yeah, that was a slightly mentally scarring failure, though I did learn a lot from it and I met some very interesting people through it.  More recently, oh my gosh, I could just list these failures -- Sarah Ellis: We are going to list some more of them shortly anyway, as examples. Helen Tupper: Great!  A finance failure; I think I make a lot of finance failures.  That's one of my repeated failures.  When our business was first -- I can't even remember the exact numbers.  I mean, this is how much I should have learned from this situation, but when Sarah and I were first setting up Amazing If, it was a side project for a really long time, and I didn't really realise there was this income threshold that you have with a business before you have to pay VAT.  Everybody listening is like, "Of course there is, Helen, of course there is! So, for two or three years, because it had been a small side project, we'd earned under the threshold.  And then we had this one year, I think it was three years into it or something, where we had this big project and all of a sudden in a year, it had gone over that amount.  But I didn't realise, until we got some really scary letter from HMRC. Sarah Ellis: Oh, the HMRC letters, where they were really kind to us!  I do remember, because they actually were quite -- because they were initially, weren't we going to have to pay a really big fine, and we basically -- and I do realise that you can't have "lack of knowledge" as an excuse, but they did listen to us. Helen Tupper: It was awful! Sarah Ellis: Obviously, we paid what we needed to pay in terms of the tax or the VAT, or whatever it was, but they were quite understanding, from memory. Helen Tupper: Now arguably, was it fundamental attribution error?  Our accountant should have flagged this to us, but I'll leave that aside! Sarah Ellis: I think I do remember saying that, to be fair! Helen Tupper: I mean, I think that might have been true, however I don't think you can be a business owner who's so far removed from some of the basics of finances that you make those sorts of failures!  Hopefully that won't happen again, but yeah, those are both ones that I remember quite viscerally, I think.  What about some of yours? Sarah Ellis: Well, funnily enough, I do really remember failing my driving test, which obviously is a long, long time ago now.  But the reason that sprung to mind was, you know we talk about failure of fault; I don't think I've ever taken accountability for failing that driving test, because the story that I tell other people and tell myself, not that I talk about it all the time, but essentially some new traffic lights had gone up in Kettering Town Centre, and those new traffic lights, for roadworks or whatever, threw me, so I drove through a red light! Helen Tupper: You know when you do a test at school and the teacher tells everyone basically what questions you're going to get, and then on the day there's a different question, and you blame the teacher?  You're like, "Well, they didn't tell me exactly what the…"! Sarah Ellis: Yeah!  So, I absolutely blamed, and I think I still do, blamed Kettering Town Centre for changing those lights.  And then, you know the person who's your assessor, they had to use their controls -- Helen Tupper: The stoppy things! Sarah Ellis: Well, yeah, to stop us crashing. Helen Tupper: Brakes; they're called brakes, aren't they?! Sarah Ellis: Yeah; the stoppy things!  It's been a long week.  But even then, I was like, "Well, it's not that I failed, it's the fault of everyone else".  I think I even was like, "That assessor gave me a really hard test".  So, the blame game thing, the reason that example came to mind was almost through understanding a bit more about failure.  I was like, "Okay, I mean I clearly shouldn't have driven through a red light", and I'm going to take accountability for that. Helen Tupper: I feel like that might be a pivotal moment in your entire life, that you've just taken accountability for that. Sarah Ellis: For some failure, finally.  I definitely have had a job that I felt I really failed in the whole of the job.  So, you know we have different types of failures, don't we, like a project fails, or you fail to do something very well?  But I had a job I was so excited about, and it was nothing.  I definitely didn't blame the company here; I think I did feel like this was more like my failure. I went to work for Lucozade and I was so excited.  I thought it was going to be -- you know when you just think you've really built up the expectation of what the job it?  I say that and I think what I'd done is really build up the expectation of the brand, because I liked sport.  I was like, "I like sport and Lucozade is sort of sporty and therefore, I'm going to love this job", without really realising that it was a sales job that I was -- I really failed at that job. You know we talk about having wins of the week and very small successes?  I really struggle to think about anything that I did well in the whole of that job. Helen Tupper: Well, do you know what you did well?  I know this is not about successes, but you left.  You left and you didn't leave it that long. Sarah Ellis: Yeah, that's true.  But I always feel like I failed to even -- I didn't even really talk to -- they were owned by a company called GlaxoSmithKline, and I didn't talk to that company about the fact that I felt like I was failing, and in hindsight I'm pretty sure if I had, there was lots of other jobs in that company.  I was just the wrong person for that job.  So, yeah, I think I failed in all sorts of ways for about nine months, which is quite a long time to feel like you're failing for, and it did really knock my confidence, that nine months did. Then more recently, I think we're going to talk about some very specific failures we've had in Amazing If, so I'll save those for later; that's something for us all to look forward to! Helen Tupper: Can't wait! Sarah Ellis: But I was also thinking, and again we won't dive into this too much, because it's not a therapy podcast, but I did feel like I was failing for a lot of the first year of my little boy's life.  This is a while ago now, because he's five.  But certainly, when I first became a parent, I didn't feel like I spent a lot of time succeeding.  I actually do feel like, you know we talked about failure makes even more failure?  The time I recognised that most is the first year of becoming a parent, it's actually not to do with work.  I felt like I was failing almost in increasing amounts as each week went by, and I can laugh about it now. Helen Tupper: Failure squared. Sarah Ellis: Yeah, it just felt like I definitely wasn't getting any better.  If anything, I felt like it was just getting worse.  And yeah, you find your way through those moments, but it was interesting to see what comes to mind as those examples.  So, let's move on from that and let's talk about -- Helen Tupper: Shall we have a deep breath?  A cleanse, a failing cleanse! Sarah Ellis: A failing cleanse, yeah, it does feel like that, doesn't it?  But I think there are two things that we're going to talk about: one which is a bit about pre-empting failure.  So, the purpose of pre-empting failure is not that we can stop it happening, because if that is your criteria for success, we are basically setting ourselves up to fail, ironically.  But I think there are some things that you can do that mean you fail better, so we're going to talk about a few ideas there. Then, we are going to talk about responding to failure, how you can think about what kind of failure has happened, and then an idea for action to help you, in that moment, what might you do differently.  So, do you want to start with the pre-empting, Helen? Helen Tupper: Yeah, I'll start with pre-empting.  And I think the other reason you want to practise a bit of pre-emptive failure is just to get comfortable with the concept.  You know that whole, "failure feels quite emotive"; I think the more comfortable you can get with the concept of failing, the less dramatic it feels when it happens and the more you treat it as something for your development instead.  So, a couple of different ideas for how you can pre-empt failure then. The first one is to do project premortems.  So, let's say you're kicking something off, so I don't know, me and Sarah are going to launch a new website with loads of career development materials on.  We're not, by the way, but let's just imagine we are.  What you want to think about is before you even start that project, you almost want to try and kill it.  What are all the reasons that this could fail?  And get super-super-critical, just so you can spot them and consider them, and it's almost like failure becomes more of a data point, rather than this identity issue, which is sometimes what it can feel like when you fail. It's just what could fail; what's likely to happen; maybe what's happened before?  They're just data points and we're trying to collect them, so you just become a bit more objective about it all.  So, the more you can do project premortems and talk about failure in that concept, that might be useful. Sarah Ellis: Do you know what that makes me think as well?  You can't help but think, because if you're starting to ask yourself, "What is most likely to fail?  What has failed before?" almost for every project that you and I work on together, I think we have some very consistent failures.  So for example, we are both, and it's good to share these things, but neither of us are very good at writing things down, and it means that we waste ideas, it means we waste energy, it means we lose stuff, it means we can't find things. Helen Tupper: It's so bloody annoying; really annoying! Sarah Ellis: And I get so frustrated with you and me and us, but every time. Helen Tupper: We were having a meeting on Monday, Sarah, that we can talk about, because we had a meeting on Monday and I was talking and I was like, "Why aren't you writing it down?  I'm not going to write it down, because I know if I write it down, it's basically on a Post-it Note that I'm going to lose.  Could you just pretend to write it down so it's going to be stored somewhere?!" Sarah Ellis: But it is quite interesting if you start to think of it in that way.  I think you probably have based on what you're brilliant at, but also what your consistent "even better ifs" are, I reckon you could start to pinpoint, almost with everything I work on, here are the things, here are the contributing factors to failure, because of those things you find hard, or those things you don't enjoy.  And even just thinking it through as you were describing that, I was like, "Yeah, that would actually be really useful for us to do". Helen Tupper: Well, I guess the more often you do it, the more often you do those project premortems, the more you see your high-frequency failures.  And I think if you could really talk about and explore high-frequency failures, that would be really effective, that would be really useful to do.  One to take away, Sarah, some high-frequency failures. Sarah Ellis: Yeah.  I feel like we're getting a to-do list that neither of us are writing down. Helen Tupper: We'll put it in the PodSheet, everyone, you can share our to-do list.  Okay, so the second way you can pre-empt failure is to invite some failure critics into your world.  Just caveat, these are not comfortable conversations, everybody.  So, these are people that can sometimes come across as a bit deliberately difficult; they can make you feel a bit defensive.  I'm not going to name names, though I have some in my life, but they're quite useful because you know when you're excited about an idea, and you only see the opportunity in it, and the excitement behind it?  A failure critic is somebody who I think can give you back a bit of perspective, because they go, "Well, have you thought about that?  Have you thought about this?  You need to do that". Now, I think them on their own, it can feel a bit negative, but when I think about some of those people that I have and talk to, they always come up with very good points that I definitely haven't considered.  And as long as you can -- I actually think almost framing them as a failure critic in your mind puts a better spin on it, because if you're like, "You're just being deliberately difficult", I mean that's never going to be a fun conversation; but if you recognise the value in what they bring, which is ultimately a more balanced consideration of something, because they might be more critical and you might be more positive, then I think it's quite a useful exercise to have people like that that you go to. Sarah Ellis: And I think those people do need to be different to you, because in your project premortems, you will be able to critique whatever you're going to work on in a certain way.  You and I can do that together, although we're both very optimistic and we get very energised by new ideas, there are certain ways of thinking and problem-solving that we're both good at.  But I think you've got to find people who come at a project or an opportunity from a different angle to you, because then they can critique it in a way that you can't. A few people I've spoken to in the past always talk about, you know if you're studying something like art, where you've actually done a bit of work and you can self-critique; let's use the painting as a classic example.  You've done a painting, you can self-critique that.  But actually, by hearing from five other people, who have approached that painting in a very different way, you hear a variety of critiques that just make you consider your work in a new light and in a new way that you hadn't seen it before, and I find that really fascinating. I think people who have been through that kind of a world actually have a very different approach to critique, got a very positive approach to critique.  And I think you and I were talking about this beforehand, and I think so often I definitely get defensive; but if I thought of them as this way of going, "Okay, well it's my painting, but I do actually appreciate a critique from a few other different people, because that's what's going to make something better, I'm going to do better paintings as a result", it's stepping out of your world into another, and borrowing from a different world to make yourself better. Helen Tupper: I think controlling the critique also feels different, like un-asked-for feedback on my potential failures, uncomfortable.  But if I control the critique, if I invite you to critique, I think that feels slightly different.  And the third area, if you want to get into this pre-emptive failure approach, is to proactively learn from other people's failures.  There's a few things you can do here.  You're basically going to look outside of your job, your world, and see what you can learn from other people who've failed.  I feel a bit bad for those people but just as an example, maybe if you work in marketing, for example, you might want to look at proposition failures. So, you could look at business's products or business models, lots of start-ups for example; there's a high rate of failure in start-up.  But that means there's a high opportunity to learn.  Maybe people failures.  I was trying to think of a good one there.  You know we both watched the WeCrashed series? Sarah Ellis: Oh, yeah. Helen Tupper: I mean, that's quite a good way to learn about lots of different failures that went on in that organisation.  I mean, it's a dramatised programme, but there's probably quite a lot that you can learn from seeing how such a successful leader perhaps had a few failures; Adam Neumann, who was the co-founder of that business. But PR failures, when lots of different organisations come out in the media and they get it wrong.  It's more, what can we learn from what they did, and how might that help you to do something different in the future?  It's that sort of process that we're getting into with the pre-emptive failures. Sarah Ellis: Yeah, the more you think about this, the more examples I think spring to mind.  I've started to really think about all my failures.  I'm like, "I could think of about five more now"!  But what we're going to do next is, how do you respond when this inevitable failure happens?  Our reference here is a really good article from Amy Edmondson all about failure and the different types of failure, because her points, and the reason this has really inspired us, is not all failure is the same; we fail for different reasons.  If you understand the why, you can get to more useful ideas for action. So, we have taken her work and we've distilled it and summarised it, so it's definitely worth reading that article as well, because it goes into lots more detail, but we're going to talk about four different types of failure, give an example and an idea for action for each.  So, even more examples coming your way!  So the first one is foolish failures.  This is when you are tired, stressed, you're not paying attention.  It's one of those silly failures that you get really mad about when these things happen, and they're often very avoidable, which is why they're so frustrating.  But obviously, they also all happen to us. For example, about three weeks ago, we recorded a podcast that we've already recorded, and it's the first time that has ever happened to us in what must be three years.  But if you wanted to hear an alternative version about politics at work, we literally have two versions of it.  We tried to listen to be, "Can we justify this as a different podcast?"  We're like, "Not really!" because we've just done the same thing.  That was so obviously stupid. Helen Tupper: Really annoying. Sarah Ellis: It was so annoying, and yeah, that's an out-an-out failure.  And it was caused by, that week we had a lot on.  So, we were doing a lot, making a lot happen, we were both tired, so we had the double whammy of both begin tired, both begin busy, equals an avoidable failure. So, the idea for action here is, when you know you're in that moment and you're feeling stressed, you've got loads on or you're just tired, make sure that you win that stress, you've got that safety net.  It's no surprise to us when we're feeling stressed, it's not like we don't know that's happening; but the bit that we can do is couple that stress with a safety net. A safety net could be a person.  So, let's just say you're having a really tough week, you think, "I need my safety net this week", and that could be someone where you just say, "Can you just have a quick read of this presentation before I share it?"  For example, in Amazing If, when I write a proposal, Helen doesn't read that before I share that with someone.  But I could think, "I'm having a really tough week, this is a real fertile territory for foolish failures, so Helen, can you just take 15 minutes and read this before I send it?" So, it might be a person; it could be a process.  You might think, "This week, there's a lot going on.  Though I might be working late, I'm not going to send my emails late.  I'm going to do a delayed send of those emails.  I'll get them ready to send, or I'll reread them tomorrow morning before I send them".  Or maybe it's a checklist.  There are actually some really interesting examples in that article about how useful checklists are.  This really appeals to me, without being something that I would ever naturally do or be good at.  But I think, because I like control, to be honest, I think probably checklists help with control. But this idea of going, "Okay, before we record a podcast, perhaps we have a checklist of three things that we do every time.  One, we make sure that it's recording properly". Helen Tupper: "Helen's got her microphone turned the right way!" Sarah Ellis: Yeah, so that's happened, but that's another avoidable failure.  So, maybe there's a tech test, "Microphone the right way; is it recording?"  Maybe there's a sense check of, "Let's just make sure this topic that we're doing, we haven't done before".  Then there's probably, "Can we both see our bullet points of the key things that we're going to cover?"  We don't do that, and we still don't do that, having recorded the same podcast twice, three weeks ago. Helen Tupper: But we haven't on this podcast, Sarah, and now we are more informed about failure! Sarah Ellis: Yeah, now we're more informed.  So, in that example, a checklist would probably be a really good safety net for us.  So, what I like about this is we're not saying it's the same safety net every time; we're going, choose your safety net, depending on what that failure might look like when you're under pressure, essentially.  So, I like that: stress equals needing a safety net. Helen Tupper: So, our second type of failure is a fixable failure, and this is where a failure has happened, either because there's just a rubbish process in place, so it was inevitable it would fail, because things weren't being checked by the right people, or someone was a bit of a bottleneck in the process, all that kind of thing; or perhaps you have been asked to do something that you just don't have the skills to do, you're probably out of your depth and not supported with it. Again, failure feels hard, but this one was probably sort of inevitable, but the good news as well is, it's also probably quite fixable, but you need to think a little bit more about who you can talk to, or what skills might you need.  So, to give you an example, they're weirdly-related podcast examples, but we did tell you this is Sarah and me reflecting on our own issues at the moment! This Monday, Sarah and I were together and we knew we had quite a few things to do, including recording this podcast.  By the way, we're recording it on Friday; and the reason we're recording it on Friday and not Monday is because we had a pretty poor process at the start of the day.  We had a list of things to get done and we basically just started with, "What was the last thing we talked about, and then we'll fit the rest in and have lunch at some point". A better process would be, "What is the most time-critical thing on this agenda that affects the most other people?", which is the podcast.  We record the podcast, it has to be edited, it goes to four different people, who produce the PodSheets, put it on the website, produce the transcriptions for it.  And if we had just had a better process of, "What do we need to get done today?  What is the priority thing that affects the most people?", we would have really restructured how we'd done that, but we don't have a process for that.  We just end up having a long list and we just go, "Okay, what shall we grab first?" That's an example of a way in which you could improve the process.  There are some coach-yourself questions, that is a good place to start here.  If you feel that some of your failures are probably fixable, one thing you might be able to ask yourself is, "Who could help you get better?"  So, in that scenario that I just talked through, maybe there's somebody who's really good at prioritising their time that could be really useful for Sarah and me. Or, a second coach-yourself question, "Where could you borrow brilliance from to help you to improve?"  So, maybe I could borrow some of the processes from other people.  There could be a person who you could learn from, or there could just be a process that we could borrow in terms of how people manage their time and their priorities. Sarah Ellis: Do you know what I was thinking would be fascinating for us?  This is a failure, not even unique to the fact that we didn't do the podcast that we needed to do; but I'm not sure when we spend time together that we sometimes have failures because of how we spend time together.  I think even in terms of how we both turn up, you turn up and usually, you're just very spontaneous, you're very go-with-the-flow.  I turn up, and I have written us, in Teams, an agenda of what I think we should cover in what order. So then, you go to whatever I've written, and that actually also tends to be where we start, and I tend to pick, I think, the things that I want to do versus the things that we need to do.  And they're often important, but I'm not quite so good at the urgent. Helen Tupper: I just have a "get it done and get it all done" mentality, don't I, and you have a "get done what I want to do first" thing! Sarah Ellis: Brilliant, what a combination we are! Helen Tupper: I also think that I've probably been doing some other stuff beforehand, and you've probably been thinking about the stuff that we need to do beforehand as well, so we end up at a slightly messy meeting point really, which I guess is the learning point from that failure, that repeated failure. Sarah Ellis: I was like, it would be fascinating if we had a neutral observer almost to go, literally someone comes and spends half a day or a day with us, and just watches. Helen Tupper: Can you imagine?! Sarah Ellis: Do you know what, I would sort of be fearful, but I think it could actually be fascinating to just see, what would someone say to us?  You know, if they were doing that critical review of almost, "Well, here's all the reasons why you're going to fail if you work in this way".  But actually, I think I'd be really interested in that. One of the things we have started to do, and we're just trying this a little bit, and it's still quite new to our team in Amazing If, is because I read that point about our brains are not very good at learning from failure, I think if I think about Helen's and my messy meetings, let's call them that for a second, all of our meetings are messy, they have always been that way; they're not getting any better.  But if you can share your fail-fast-forward moments with other people, it means that you have to press pause and consider what you've learnt, so that it means that your brain can't get distracted and it can't just ignore that failure, you have to move forward. We didn't do this on Monday, but if we'd have gone, "We had a fail-fast-forward moment today", and we'd shared that with the Amazing If team, "we feel like we're having these messy meetings and what we learnt was, we're not prioritising in the right way, we still don't take notes in those meetings", all of those things, even talking about it today, for example, will really help us, because we've created a forcing function to be really clear about what we've learnt. Then, being explicit about that, you are then much more likely to be able to do something differently next time versus I think probably what happens is, we all move on too fast.  That's what we do, right?  We just have a messy meeting, get a bit frustrated, then move on to the next messy meeting! Helen Tupper: Oh my gosh, this is really depressing! Sarah Ellis: On a Friday!  Here's how to end your week on a high; talk about loads of failures.  I feel like you want to compensate and just go, "Let's talk about some good stuff", but no, we've got two more things to talk about. Helen Tupper: Let's keep moving forward with failure, Sarah!  Number three. Sarah Ellis: So our third type of failure is when you fail because the future is uncertain.  So, we can't ever control everything; there's lots of complexity; there's lots of, we've not done things before and we just don't know how things are going to happen.  So, example here, we're moving away from the podcast, you'll be pleased to know, is next week in the UK, there are some train strikes.  So, I've got two days where I'm due to be out and about across the UK, where I was planning to be on a train.  And actually, even this week, I had a train journey where a train was cancelled, I didn't know that was going to happen, and then obviously that has a knock-on impact in your day. What I really like here is this idea of thinking about, in those moments where that sort of failure is happening to you, and if you can do it in the moment, great, or as soon after the moment, that also works well, just be clear about what was in your control and what is out of your control.  So, do an "in your control, out of your control" list.  That can be quite a helpful way of processing the failure. So actually, when I had a really bad train journey this week, on Wednesday, I did this and it really helped me, because I didn't have one bad train journey, I had about three.  I've never had a day where so many travel things simultaneously went wrong.  But I think because in my head, I actually did do this, I did the, "What's in my control is how I then show up on stage for the people I'm going to talk about; that is in my control".  So, I was like, "I'm going to give this everything I have got, because I can do that and it's not their fault as well that these trains didn't work.  But also, it's not my fault either". I think that really helped me to deliver in the moment, and actually we talk about -- we do win of the week, every Friday in Amazing If, let's talk about something positive; and that was my win of the week, because I think I did, though there was a bit of a failure based on future uncertainty, I was clear about what was in and out of my control, I responded well in the moment and actually, I still had to fail on something, because I failed to then turn up for a workshop that we'd got planned, which I felt very bad about.  But what I then did was wrote to those people and explained why, really apologised and described what we were going to do differently. One thing I didn't do, which is another technique that can be helpful when there's a lot of uncertainty that might be coming your way, is do worst-case scenario planning and write a rescue plan.  So, what I could have done, which I didn't, was think, "That's a big day, I've got a really big moment on Wednesday.  What happens if the trains, or my travel arrangements do get messed up?"  That's probably the worst-case scenario.  I could do, "What happens if I'm ill?  What's the rescue plan?  Is the rescue plan Helen; is the rescue plan doing it at a different time; is it offering something different?" That, I think, is almost a separate idea for action, but can also be really useful.  And there's a great philosophical quote that I found, from Seneca, where he says, "The man who has anticipated the coming of troubles takes away their power when they arrive".  I was like, "Oh, okay". Helen Tupper: How wise Seneca was. Sarah Ellis: I know.  I'm going to borrow his brilliance, because I do think those two things, almost before the moment, worst-case scenario planning and rescue planning before the moment, and then in and out of your control in the moment, I think do really help with failures that come from uncertainty. Helen Tupper: And the fourth failure, and by the way, we didn't say, they come from Amy Edmondson's work, these different types of failures; the fourth one, I find it an interesting one, sort of a fact-finding failure, but it's almost a deliberate failure.  What you're doing here is you're using experiments or tests in order to fail, because the point of doing experiments and tests is not for them always to be successful; but fail in order to find some more facts out.  It's almost like you're purposely creating some failures, through experiments and tests, so that you can intentionally identify some new facts that you wouldn't have otherwise known. So, I do feel this is one of the most positive ways that you can fail, but I often find people are quite uncomfortable with the concept of experiments and testing, partly because they don't partly know how to do it, and we've done a whole podcast on the topic of how to experiment more at work, but I'll give you an example of a way that we almost intentionally fail in order to find out some facts.  And then, there's lots of things that we do, but a small one that we do often is on social media. We will often put some failure fact-finding experiments in place, where we will try out new bits of content.  What are we doing at the moment?  We're doing Squiggly Career Conundrums, where we take lots of common requests that we get from listeners, or from the Squiggly Careers community, and then we put it out there, a bit like Dear Dolly, if any of you know what Dolly Alderton does; she answers readers' questions.  And we're trying and thinking, one of our values is "useful", and it's like an experiment to see, "Is this a useful thing that we could do for our Squiggly Careers community?" It's a complete experiment and it may well fail, like a failure looks like no one really engages with it and it's not very helpful.  But at least we're using a failure in order to find out some facts, which might be that there could be some things in there that are good that we might want to do differently; or it might be that we just kill it and we just learn to kill it quickly. But what's really important here, is with this kind of failure, a failure that you're almost creating in order to find out some facts, is that you get failure feedback; because, if you don't do that, then you're missing the opportunity to learn from this moment.  So, what you really want to do is label this as a bit of an experiment, "We haven't done this before, I'm trying it out for the first time", and to design what you're doing, so that it's easier for you to get feedback from other people, "What worked well?  What would be even better if?  Why do you think this failed?  What would you do differently next time?" that sort of thing.  And if you know that you're going to get failure feedback, you might design the experiment differently from the outset. Sarah Ellis: Yeah, somebody who I know who is very, very good at experiments, it's their modus operandi in terms of the business that they run, he described himself to me recently as, "I'm a really effective evaluator".  So, everything that they do is about experiments and I was thinking, "That's so interesting", because I think I'm actually very comfortable with experimenting, because I love trying new things out; but I think I sometimes miss the point, I miss the value, because I don't think about failure feedback. So I'll be like, "I'm really happy to try new stuff out.  It doesn't bother me if some of those things don't work", because like you say, this is probably not always easy to do, but personally I'm quite comfortable with this.  You and I both worked in innovation-type jobs and you don't work in those jobs unless you like experiments.  But I can think back to examples where I didn't have that effective evaluation alongside the experiment. Then it just means that when you fail, because inevitably some of those things do fail, it does actually feel more like a failure, rather than, "Yeah, that might have failed, but I haven't failed to learn", because I've been really clear about what I know, I've measured and I've thought about that from the start versus I just get over-excited and just want to get started.  So I think having that, "Am I an effective evaluator?" when I'm doing this, to make sure I'm going to get that failure feedback, that's I think the mindset that we're looking for here. Helen Tupper: So, what we will do in the PodSheet is we will summarise all of those different ideas for action, the three that we mentioned around pre-empting failure, and then those four different areas of responding to failures, so you've got all that summarised.  And as I mentioned at the start, that's in the links to the show notes. Sarah Ellis: So, that's everything for this week.  If you have any topics you would like us to cover, please always do get in touch, and we really do appreciate everyone who takes the time to rate, review and subscribe.  Please keep doing it and if it's been on your to-do list for a while, it only hopefully takes five minutes, and it's a really great way that you can support us and share Squiggly with the world. But that's everything for this week.  Thank you so much for listening and we'll be back with you again soon.  Bye for now. Helen Tupper: Bye everyone.