How do you create a culture that is not afraid to fail (or be more receptive to social media?)

Several months ago, my colleague Rachel Happe from the Community Roundtable invited me to facilitate a discussion with members about the issues that swirl around organizational adoption of social media.   I told her I wanted to talk about the "f" word (failure).   

So, we came up with this topic:  "Creating a Culture that is not Afraid to Fail."    I thought this would be a great opportunity to reflect on some of my recent blog posts on this topic as well as gain new insights from others who work on social media in a corporate (and nonprofit) setting as well as my network.

I'm defining failure as a social media strategy or program implementation that wasn't perfect or didn't work as well as you expected especially the first few times you did it.   This happens quite frequently with social media, especially in the early stages. 

We set unrealistic outcomes, don't have a methodology for learning or sloppy strategy implementation.  We get poor results.  We're quick to proclaim that social media doesn't work, feel some shame, and drop it.  We look at the wrong measures or unrealistic outcomes. We don't value the learning and use that insight to improve the social media strategy the second or third or fourth time around. 

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Michael Quinn Patton, an evaluation guru, speak at the Packard Foundation.  I captured his talk in this blog post "What do Maori Creation Stories Have in Common With Social Media?"

He described the challenges of adapting evaluation methods to non-Western systems in developing countries because evaluation has traditionally been deeply rooted in the Western ways of thinking.  He started to collect "creation stories" to explain the difference between traditional approaches (you create a program, implement it, and collect data to measure its success) versus developmental evaluation (an evaluation that gathers information to help you improve the program.)

He shared the creation story of Maori people.  

In the beginning, father sky and mother earth - embraced.  Such a fierce embrace - only darkness was in between them.  Children were born into this space but they became unhappy and plotted to push the parents apart.  It became clear that they would have to join together and need the strength of the oldest.  A lot of bickering followed and failed attempts by the younger siblings.   Having observed failed attempts, the oldest said said they would have to put their backs into it - back against father sky and feet against mother earth.  The push the parents apart.  Father sky was crying - and that became rain.   Pushing apart parents, had exposed the nakedness of his mother.  He began to plant trees to hide her body.  They had never planted a tree before.  First they tried roots in the air, leaves in ground.  It failed.  They tried laying them on the ground.  Finally they succeeded by planting the roots in the ground.   They then grew forests and the eldest child became the god of the Forrest. 

Patton points out that they were not sure what they were trying to get to or the result. They had a general sense, but had some learning before getting it right.   This is the essence of developmental evaluation.  I see this as very similar to the listen, learn, and adapt process that you need to use for social media strategy.

A big question is how do you get people in your organization to value this learning versus viewing it as a failure or waste?  How do get past the fear of failure?  To prepare for this discussion, I posed this question on my Facebook status and Twitter: "How do you create an organizational culture that is not afraid to fail?   It was one of the most commented status alerts and responded to questions on Twitter that I've had a while.

Here's what I learned:

(1) Must come from the top: reward learning

Don Bartholomew points out that culture must come from the top and that leadership needs to reward taking risks versus punishing failure.  As Roger Carr says reward innovation regardless of the outcome. Danny Blue suggests that leaders create opportunities to work on experimental projects and hindsight everything.  From every failure there is something to learn. You take the learning from the last failure and you build something awesome out of it. Scott Bechtler-Levin said on Twitter in less than 140 characters: "Change happens when the desire for gain is greater than the fear of loss."

(2)   Unpack the fear of failure through internal discussions

I recently came across an article by Rosabeth Moss Kanter (no relation) from the Harvard Business School called "To Master Change, First Dread It"   She describes the stress and feelings of lost control that change in organizations engenders.   She goes on to say that the stress leads to paralysis.   She offers a counter-intuitive tip for moving past it:

A counter-intuitive tip for mastering change is to start by wallowing in the feelings of dread it arouses. The sheer nail-biting horror of it all. Get in touch with every negative aspect, all the things that could go wrong. Then figure out a way to get that negative force on your side. In short, "Dream your worst nightmare and invest in it."

I think this is the key to adoption and social media success.  To create your social media guidelines, examine the worst possible scenario, ask what if questions, wallow in all your fears, etc.  I call this putting a smiley face on the screamer.   One of the best methods to remove fear is to encourage social media literacy through personal use.

Holly Hight has a good case study on how her organization got past the fear through discussion in this post "When Controlling the Message Stifles Community"

(3)  Make learning the norm

Anne Yurasek says "You need to create a set of agreed upon norms around how failure is viewed and experienced by your organization and then it's about monitoring if the norms are reflective of behavior. "  Steve Heye asks, "What is the reaction is to a failure? Is it blame or a reflection to see what could have been done differently?."   As Margaret Egan notes, it is important that leadership creates a culture of questioning, where learning is paramount and failure will be a given and Christine Lu says it is all about having people in your organization that the personality trait of enables them to take risks and learn.

(4) Emphasize what works

Jeff Jackson pointed to examples from healthcare and airline industries which have implemented culture changes around failure for years, with varying degrees of success.  In healthcare, terms are used like blamefree environment, failure analysis, and responsible reporting.  He also points to a growing trend to adopt appreciative inquiry which focuses on creating more of what works best (failure is fully accepted, but not searched out, nor studied). 

(5) Start small, early, and reiterate

Claire Murray suggests starting small, as in one division or group.  It   helps lay the overall groundwork, iron out some of the wrinkles, and provide a model to follow. As in any venture like this, it requires managers who can accept the word from the ground, criticism, and who are not afraid to share.   In this morning's email, Chris Brogan suggested that getting past the fear of failure means starting small, fail fast, and start again. 

Here's an interview about culture change from Planned Parenthood that I posted in July.   Allison Fine catches up with Tom Subak from Planned Parenthood to discuss culture change in this podcast.

Tom gives an example of real life resistance in his organization. 

How has your organization gotten past the fear of failure that effective social media strategy requires?

Comments

[BarbaraKB]

Beth, a timely and inspiring post. I especially needed: (2) "Unpack the fear of failure through internal discussions" and its look @ "controlling the message." So much of the fear is about losing control. As always, thanks for your encouragement!

[Beth]

Glad you found it useful! B

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 11:48 AM, wrote:

[Roger Carr]

Hi Beth,
This was an interesting question and blog post. Your post hinted at it, but one thing I am taking away from this is that you have to define "success" in order to know if you are succeeding or failing. That is not usually easy when the topic is social media.

[twitter.com/mindsondesign]

Nice post, thank you. Wanted to respond on twitter but couldn't get my thoughts down to 140 characters. Really reminds me of some thoughts on learning theory and pedagogy (my career began as a elementary school teacher). In particular 1 and 3 as noted above regarding authentically owning and living the role of life-long learners. The combination of risk taking and exposure to something new with continual reflection do strike me as key ingredients to be able to take risks, fail, and see that as a process and positive rather than a discouragement.

Also, the idea of scaffolding your risk taking also comes to mind. Setting up risks/learning experiences that are just beyond your comfort level to establish what may be a more manageable and less overwhelming initial risk. As knowledge is gained the scaffold changes to accommodate the growth and learning over time.

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=504747699]

Thank you for the thoughtful comments on this post.
@mindsondesign - I like your connection to teaching and learning - good analogy and the reminder about the concept of scaffolding.

And, just noticing that typepad has implemented Facebook connect.

[Beth]

Roger, that is a good point. You also have to define realistic success so
what could be a success isn't viewed as failure.

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 3:07 AM, wrote:

[Rachel Happe]

Thanks for the post Beth and for coming to speak with members of The Community Roundtable. This is such an interesting topic to me and I think one that is really hard for organizations to grapple with because people are mostly hired to do a specific job, not because of their skill sets and ability to learn. What happens when people outgrow the job they were hired for? It causes inconvenient disruption to standardized processes.

I love the scaffolding analogy too. One thing that we try to do at TCR, is to deliver programming that is partially what our members ask for but partially what we think members need to be thinking about, even if they are not... in essence provide the scaffolding that they can climb, which is just a bit higher than they need it to be right now. The art in that, of course, is staying just enough ahead of people that they can still link new material back to the needs they have at the moment.

Really looking forward to the conversation!

[Joaquin Roca]

Great post, Beth, it has me thinking a few different things. First, my research interests are around achievement goal orientation and creativity. Specifically, how can some combination of a mastery goal (aiming to increase competence) and a performance goal (aiming to display competence) increase creativity. The mastery goal allows people to struggle, seek challenges, explore failure, and learn new things while the performance goal focuses people on outcomes. It is the combination of these two that forces people to allow time for experimentation and failure while still making progress toward a desired goal. At least that is what I hope to show, I will let you know once the data are analyzed.

The second thing it brought up for me was the idea of culture change starting from behavior change. W. Warner Burke talks about this idea in relation to the James-Lange theory. If people change their behavior it will eventually change values and assuptions (that is culture). The implication being if you can change the way people act in the short run you can change an organization's culture in the long run. How you change people's behavior is another question, likely a combination of management systems, rewards and recognition, training, or something as simple as modeling the behavior yourself.

Thanks for the post, I enjoyed reading it.

[Beth Kanter]

Some key takeaways from the discussion:

* The importance of having group "learning together" opportunities in addition to one-on-one coaching.
* Scaffolding the experience for the executive - so they can do one small step at a time over time.
* First dip into social media should be low risk, not even an organizational project. Something that they are interested in. Avoids the problem of hands-on learning in public which causes a lot of stage fright.
* Importance of getting leadership past the veritigo feeling that comes with experiencing social media.
* Important to help leadership make the transition - having a trusted peer show them social media..
* Sometimes the fear isn't fear, but the concern about time constraints
* Find metaphors or analogies to explain it - so doesn't seem so foreign.
* Use of senarios to look at the worst possible cases
* Importance of internal technology steward

[Bill Bennett]

I'm impressed you used a Maori story to illustrate this point. We're used to taking management lessons from them here in New Zealand, but I wasn't aware the rest of the world had tuned in.

[steve johnson]

Thanks Beth,

First, congrats on your anniversary! Second, I appreciated your discussion about bloggers and the humor you have. Keep up the good work.

[June Holley]

I've found that it's not just that we avoid talking about mistakes, we avoid reflection that explores all the breakthroughs we've made and never see because we're too quickly onto the next action. Here is a quick brainstorm of questions we could ask that might help networks reflect more effectively. Any to add?

Questions to Help Deep Reflection Occur

1.What worked really well in this project?
2.Did it accomplish goals or outcomes? In what ways?
3.Did it fall short? Why?
4.What would you do differently?
5.What surprises came up during the project? What unexpected happened? What could you learn or capture from that?
6.What insights did you get during the project?
7.What processes did you use that worked well? Which didn’t work so well? Why do you think that was?
8.How did people work together? Were there conflicts? How were they handled? Did people get any new insights or perspectives as a result?
9.Were there people or perspectives missing from this project that you would include next time?
10.What skills and processes did you help people learn as part of this project? What skills and processes would you spend time on if you did this over again?
11.What were the most innovative aspects of the project? How did they work?
12.What did you do in this project that you could transfer to other projects?
13.What is the most troubling aspect of the project? What might you do to deal with it differently?
14.What skills came in most handy during this project? What skills did this project make you realize you need to acquire?
15.What really puzzles you about this project? What are unanswered questions you have about what happened?
16.What intrigues you about this project?
17.What would you like to learn more about that would help this (or other projects) in the future?
18.Where did we mess up? Make mistakes? Fall on our face? What can we learn from this?