How to Embrace Failure in Learning
鈥淭o Fail is Human鈥� ...okay, it's not quite Alexander Pope but you get the idea.
Failure!
It鈥檚 a word that produces a physical reaction when you hear it.
It鈥檚 a word we are programmed and taught to avoid for so much of our lives 鈥� especially through school.
You remember those days like they were yesterday right?
Person up the front of a room reading out stuff. Consume content. Get tested on your retention of content. Pass and you feel relief and receive the approval of your teacher and more importantly mum and dad.
Fail and you want to crawl into a hole as you feel you鈥檝e let others down. Beat yourself up and promise everyone you鈥檒l consume more content and try to retain content better next time for that day that you need to apply it.
That last bit of course, was never part of the curriculum. You got detention if you asked, 鈥淲hen will we use this?鈥�
No wonder the school system itself has failed so many.
And we see this mindset within learning at work.
Take for example this classic conversation overheard in many meeting rooms throughout the world:
Person 1: 鈥淲e need to have an assessment.鈥�
Person 2: 鈥淲丑测?鈥�
Person 1: 鈥淏ecause we need to know who has passed and who hasn鈥檛.鈥�
Person 2: 鈥淲丑测?鈥�
Person 1: 鈥淏ecause the regulators need it.鈥�
Person 2: 鈥淲丑测?鈥�
Person 1: 鈥淏ecause they need to know who is compliant.鈥�
Person 2: 鈥淎nd what if they鈥檙e not compliant?鈥�
Person 1: 鈥淭hen they鈥檒l do the assessment again until they鈥檙e compliant.鈥�
Person 2: *Puts head in hands while dying slowly inside.*
(Sorry - sidebar 鈥� but what does compliance in this setting even mean? I thought non-compliance was the goal when you were part of the education system 馃槉)
I鈥檓 sure most regulators are regular people with hopes and dreams of their own who also went through the school and university system and from that their only frame of reference for learning is content-test-pass/fail.
Which isn鈥檛 learning at all...
Its short-term memory retention.
When it comes to how people learn, so much of the learning that occurs within organisations is just based on what people know about learning from their formal learning experiences during their own lives.
But outside of work failure has a different meaning doesn鈥檛 it?
Here鈥檚 roughly how we learn when we鈥檙e not at work:
- We want to learn something new
- We chunk it up
- We practice a small bit
- We fail
- We reflect on what bit didn鈥檛 work and why.
- We practice it again鈥nd again鈥nd again
- And we repeat that chunk until it feels right and then we move onto the next chunk.
- We integrate it into our lives
We fail heaps. And we learn from it. And its ok.
And here鈥檚 the thing we get as individuals, that for some reason gets lost within the places we work.
Failure is not a bug of learning. It鈥檚 a feature.
If we鈥檙e going to build a learning culture for the future where our society doesn鈥檛 look like the opening 5 minutes of The Terminator, then we need to reframe what failure means for ourselves as well as where we work.
小优传媒 the author
As CEO of 小优传媒 Australia, I work with a great team to build authentic learning experiences that engage the heart before the head, and enable people to work while they learn, and learn while they work.
