It’s all fine and good to say learn from your failures, but how?  First you need to acknowledge that they will happen.  Especially right now in the current economy.  Rita McGrath notes:

Despite widespread recognition that challenging times place unpredictable demands on people and businesses, I still run across many managers who would prefer to avoid the logical conclusion that stems from this: failure is a lot more common in highly uncertain environments than it is in better-understood situations.

Then you plan for failure. Sim Sitkin talks about intelligent failure in his article “Learning through failure: The strategy of small losses.” Intelligent failure? Yep.  Essentially planning your projects to be certain that you will learn something from them succeed or fail.  What do intelligent failures look like?

• They are carefully planned, so that when things go wrong you know why
• They are genuinely uncertain, so the outcome cannot be known ahead of time
• They are modest in scale, so that a catastrophe does not result
• They are managed quickly, so that not too much time elapses between outcome and interpretation
• Something about what is learned is familiar enough to inform other parts of the business.

McGrath adds two more in her article Are You Squandering Your Intelligent Failures?

• Underlying assumptions are explicitly declared
• These can be tested at specific checkpoints, identified in advance, since planned results may not be equivalent to outcomes.

Why bother?

Failures show you where your assumptions are wrong. Failures demonstrate where future investment would be wasted. And failures can help you identify those among your team with the mettle to persevere and creatively change direction as opposed to pig-headedly charging blindly ahead. Further, failures are about the only way in which an organization can re-set its expectations for the future in any meaningful way.

Despite your best efforts and preventative measures you will still fail occasionally, best to set yourself and your project up for intelligent failure to ensure you learning something from it.

Read more

• How to Learn From Failure
• Do We Really Learn from Failure? (Part I)
• Managing Emotions to Learn from Failure
• What We Can Learn from Failure
• We learn more from success than failure

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• How to Learn From Failure
• Is Good Enough good enough?
• Pivot Points For Change: Libraries And Librarians

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

What’s my sentence? In one sentence state what lasting impression you want to leave on the world.

For day to day motivation - Was I better today than yesterday?Similar Posts:

• What Really Motivates Us at Home and at Work
• Pivot Points for Change
• Information R/evolution

The fabulous Buffy Hamilton gave her Pivot Points of Change presentation at my library’s Staff Day last week.  The points were inspired by post from Seth Godin in which he states changing everything is too difficult. Buffy applied this to libraries and librarians for the 9 pivot points of change.  This is a slightly modified version of  her original 9 pivot points of change for school librarians.

1. Instead of thinking you can only participate in face to face conferences, consider how you can participate virtually
2. Keep your traditional means of connecting with patrons and colleagues, but innovate at every possible touch point through social media and social networking
3. Keep reading your print journals, but use a feed aggregator or information portal to access and organize your favorite blogs, journals, podcasts, youtube videos, and twitter rss feeds to stay on the cutting edge
4. Keep networking with colleagues face to face, but cultivate a personal learning network to broaden your PLN (Personal Learning Network) to include librarians and other professionals from around the world who can inform your thinking, practice, and philosophy
5. Keep your traditional productivity tools, but use cloud computing to encourage collaboration and information sharing
6. Continue sharing your library program goals and reports through traditional formats, but also compose these in a different format, such as a mindmap, video, or other multimedia/visualization medium
7. Keep your traditional services and materials, but expand those services and “containers” of materials to reflect patron needs
8. Keep positing literacy as a primary focal point of your library program, but expand that definition of literacy to include new media literacy and information literacy as mainstream literacies equal in importance to traditional literacy.
9. Keep your traditional sources of authoritative information, but let the research topic and mode of research guide the integration of social media information sources and tools for delivering that content in your subject guides

Similar Posts:

• Pivot Points for Change
• Control is an Illusion You Need to Let Go
• The Hazards of Leading Culture Change

cc image used courtesy of Vermin Inc on flickr

We hear a lot about innovation and change these days. Everyone is talking about it, every is doing it, or at least trying to. There’s a problem though, change and innovation require more than lip service. Declaring that you are innovative does not make it so.

You know what I’m talking about, someone reads an article, attends a presentation, has a conversation over coffee and comes back to work and says – we’re going to be innovative! Maybe there are even a few committees put together. But then what? Nothing. The committees quit meeting and things go back to the way they were. Maybe one or two people are still trying, but no one is listening.

You know why? Because innovation doesn’t happen by committee or decree.

Organizations do not innovate. People innovate. Inspired people. Fascinated people. Creative people. Committed people. That’s where innovation begins. On the inside.

The organization’s role — just like the individual manager’s role — is to get out of the way. And while this “getting out of the way” will undoubtedly include the effort to formulate supportive systems, processes, and protocols, it is important to remember that systems, processes, and protocols are never the answer. - Mitch Ditkoff

So how do you create a culture of innovation? You start with the people who think differently than you do.

Diversity is one of those sticky terms that people seem to boil down to creating a Benetton ad. Diversity isn’t about some magical collection of five differently colored skin tones. It’s about bringing different perspectives and backgrounds to the table and creating an environment that values what can be gained from different voices who’ve taken different paths. Skin color (or gender performance) is often interpreted as a reasonable substitute for this and, for many reasons, it has been historically. But bringing in a woman whose attitude and approach is just as masculine as the men isn’t going to help your team break outside of its current mindset. They key is to bring people who think differently than you - danah boyd*

Then get out of their way.

Once you’ve hired a good staff, you sit down, you formulate a plan and then you get out of their way. John Limbert

Let them do what you hired them to do.

The really good people want autonomy — you let me do it, and I’ll do it. So I told the people I recruited: “You come in here and you’ve got to keep me informed, but you’re the guy, and you’ll make these decisions. It won’t be me second-guessing you. But everybody’s going to win together. We’re part of a team, but you’re going to run your part.” That’s all they want. They want a chance to do it. - Gordon M. Bethune

You can not force innovation to happen. You can provide the autonomy, the trust to allow people to be innovative.

Read more:

• Smart Leaders Get out of the way
• Remember to Share the Stage
• Treat Your Staff Like Adults and See What Happens
• Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
• Control is an Illusion You Need to Let Go

*danah boyd’s post is about gender issues and being a woman in todays workforce. It’s worth a read (and mostly likely a blog post) in is own right.Similar Posts:

• The Seven Deadly Sins of Innovators
• The Hazards of Leading Culture Change
• For Those Who Are an Overnight Success and For Those Who Aren’t a Video Series From Chris Brogan

cc image used courtesy of connors got heart on flickr

So often when talking about innovation or change we hear someone say don’t be afraid to fail. That is harder than it sounds, I mean really; who wants to fail? Who wants to stand up in front of a group, no matter how big or how small and admit they were wrong. I know some people would admit they were wrong, but no one wants to be wrong.

Part of the problem is failure is seen as a waste of time, of money or other resources.  But we can learn a lot from failure as Jonah Lehrer writes Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up

Too often, we assume that a failed experiment is a wasted effort. But not all anomalies are useless. Here’s how to make the most of them

1. Check Your Assumptions - Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.
2. Seek Out the Ignorant -  Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.
3. Encourage Diversity - If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.
4. Beware of Failure-Blindness - It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

Read more

• Failing to Learn and Learning to Fail (Intelligently): How Great Organizations Put Failure to Work to Improve and Innovate
• Kent Bottles: Why Smart People Don’t Learn from Failures
• How You Learn More from Success Than Failure
• Try, Try Again, or Maybe Not
• Trying and Failing Enhances Learning, According to Research by Nate Kornell
• Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn
• What Steve Wozniak Learned From Failure
• The Role of Failure in Learning

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• Stop Wasting Your Failures! Plan for Intelligent Failure
• Want Innovation? Get Out of the Way
• Pivot Points For Change: Libraries And Librarians

CC image courtesy of Bill Gracey - Gone to Mexico on flickr

The issue of control comes up over and over again when we talk about the online world. It recently it came up at Internet Librarian in many different ways, including:

• How do I stop a staff member from wasting time on Facebook?
• How do we control what staff are saying online?
• Management wants everything posted online (Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc) to go through PR.
• We don’t want employees to be able to access social networking sites?
• What about privacy?
• We can’t allow just anyone to post a comment without approving it first.
• How do we know a student is who they say they are?

I have answers to all of these questions, but these questions aren’t what this is about, what they represent is, control. Or the illusion of control.

The desire for control comes from fear. Fear of change, of the unknown, of doing things differently, of a situation not created by us, of taking risks. It is human nature to fear these things, it’s how we’ve survived.  So is adaptation and times are changing, just as they always do, and we need to adapt.

In the internet age your image/brand no longer belongs to you. It belongs to your customers. The things they have always been saying are now online for the whole world to see. The content and commentary they post about you may rank higher in search engines than your site or content. You can’t stop them. Every attempt you make will be like fighting the Hydra, cut off a head, two will grow back. I promise.

Prevent comments on your website? They’ll start their own blog or Twitter account or website. Implement a filter to block social networking sites? They will find a way around it (and you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face).

Stop wasting time trying to get control, you might be fooling your boss or the board or yourself, but you are not fooling your staff or more importantly your customers. Better yet, when you stop spending time trying to get control or pretending that you have it, it frees you and your time to address the real issues.

Still not ready to let go? Think about these questions from Andrew McAfee :

• Are you ready and willing to let more internal voices communicate and shape your brand over time?
• If not, why not?
• Is it that you don’t trust your people, or your customers?
• Is it that you don’t want any negativity at all to appear on your digital properties?
• Or is it that you’re afraid there might be too much negativity?

Still not convinced? Or need to convince someone else? Try reading these:

• The Illusion of Brand Control
• Power And The Illusion Of Control
• M.I.T. Taking Student Blogs to Nth Degree
• Case Study: Setting Content Free at Ford Motor Company
• What you can control and what you can’t.
• Social Media and The Reality of Control
• On Social Media And Culture Shift
• Why the 54% of companies blocking access to social media should unblock
• The Hazards of Leading Culture Change

*Up Next – What you can do after you’ve accepted control is an illusion.Similar Posts:

• How to Monitor Your Personal Brand (For Free)
• How social media can hurt your library
• The Hazards of Leading Culture Change

This is great slideshow by Buffy Hamilton on change. I love that it emphasizes that you don’t have to throw away everything and starting anew.  Rather adding new tools and technology to what you are currently doing.

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• Pivot Points For Change: Libraries And Librarians
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Photo by David Reece on Flickr

I’m thinking about change and culture and innovation a great deal these days so I’m reading everything I can get my hands on.  I came across this paper, or manifesto – The Hazards of Leading Culture Change. Its concise but packed with good stuff!

Some of my favorite points:

• When you are up to your backside in alligators, it is hard to remember you were there to drain the swamp.
• …the illusion of advancement is far worse than none at all.
• Three turtles sat on a log in the edge of the swamp. One decided to jump in. How many are now on the log? Nope, there are still three. Deciding and doing are not the same thing.
• Leaders sometime achieve their positions through competencies in other than superior leadership of people.
• Without hands-on trial and error and confrontation of outdated behaviors – all done with a helpful but unswerving facilitator – employees will not likely give up obsolete tasks
• Old ways can die hard – for employees and for customers.  Even if the old way has been a negative to customers, they have learned to deal with it. They also can harbor some of the same cynicism as employees, and may actually work to sabotage new efforts.
• When leaders have even the slightest doubt about the worth of the vision or the correctness of the strategies, they can acquiesce and soften their resolve before the culture change effort has had a chance to gain a solid footing
• Culture change takes a long time because its complex and disruptive.
• What separates the culture change winners from those that drop out of the race? It starts with a clear vision that is clear, compelling and constantly used both as the anchor for judgement and a lens for alignment.

These are just a few nuggets of wisdom, go read the whole paper.Similar Posts:

• Freedom, Responsibility and Culture
• Control is an Illusion You Need to Let Go
• Want Innovation? Get Out of the Way