How things usually go right and occasionally go wrong

by Kent Aitken

---

The idea of failure reports has been in vogue for a few years. Engineers Without Borders is probably the best known organization that does this, and I've heard that example cited in government circles a handful of times as a model for accountability and sharing lessons learned.

What I've heard less of is how you'd write one. The last project post-mortem I was a part of was mostly HIPPO - the Highest Paid Person's Opinion - on what they'd like to see done differently the next year. Asking people to fill out templates on what they'd do differently tends to generate the obvious answers, and it has the same problem I ran into when I tried to write a personal failure report: people don't work in a vacuum, and they often don't actually know why others took the actions they did (to say nothing of organizational politics and interpersonal dynamics acting on the person holding the pen). Even the Auditor General has expressed concern that his office's recommendations to government rarely lead to sustainable improvements. 

I ran into Etsy's Debriefing Facilitation Guide last year, which sawed through each of those shortcomings in the first few pages.

"Most traditional accident investigations tend to focus on "Someone did not do something they should have, according to someone else." ... "this results in an obvious recommendation for the future: "Next time, do what you should." Unfortunately, this approach does not result in the safer and improved future we want."

They describe the goal state to be "the presence of people's expertise, not simply the absence of accidents," which leads the principle that the goal of the debriefing is "to discover... what [people] actually did, and how they perceived the world at the time."

At which point the document segues into principles and guides for a structured, facilitated exercise. Not simply asking people. A lot of work has to go into creating a comfortable space for discussion, and getting past surface-level answers. There's a reason the "Five Whys" is such a sticky concept in strategy and planning.

All of which takes time, particularly when a project team spans 3-5 levels of the hierarchy - as it inevitably does, though debriefs rarely honour this fact. A working-level debriefing in the absence of the people who provided guidance, direction, and governance will fall short. But, if we're talking about projects that span years, involve an array of stakeholders, or carry big price tags, systematically learning why the organization produces the outcomes it does will outweigh the costs.

"The goal of a debriefing is not to produce recommendations... The goal is to seize the opportunity for an organization to learn as much as they can, in a relatively short period of time, about how people normally perceive and perform their work. Because the people involved were doing their normal work on a normal day when the event in question happened." 

My Experiment with a Personal Failure Report

by Kent Aitken

---

At this time last year - the end of the fiscal year for government, during performance review season - I wrote a personal failure report, based on the Engineers Without Borders model and likewise inspired organizations like Fail Forward. The goal was to reflect on my failures and consider how I'd make the most of those lessons learned. As Engineers Without Borders put it:

EWB believes that success in development is not possible without taking risks and innovating – which inevitably means failing sometimes. We also believe that it’s important to publicly celebrate these failures, which allows us to share the lessons more broadly and create a culture that encourages creativity and calculated risk taking. 

In the comments on last week's post (see: I Don't Have It All Together), David referenced failure reports:

We have started with failure reports and talking about failure, but very rarely do I see anyone admitting to anything that can't be construed as failing up or failing on the road to success. There's a certain "failure-based PR" lens that's rubs me the wrong way.

Here's the funny thing: after several drafts, the personal failure report just didn't work. At all. I posted it, then quickly took it down. I failed at writing a failure report.

Here's why:

• It's impossible to know if alternative decisions at certain points would have worked; there's no data on the results of choices not made
• I don't work in a vacuum. I tried to make it about how I worked within my environment, but it was impossible to fully separate my personally owned missteps
• There wasn't much overlap in the Venn diagram of A) brutal honesty about how things went, B) what I thought would be useful for others to read, and C) what I would be willing to publish (the aforementioned failure-based PR lens)

It wasn't a complete waste. The exercise reminded me about what I valued about my role in the public service, and where I had to work harder to live up to that. But all told, failures exist in a very particular context, and it's better for us - and those we'd share resultant lessons with, even publicly - to respect that.

Being up front about one's vulnerability (see: On the Value of Vulnerability) - for the sake of intellectual honesty, creating a safe space for dialogue, and building trust - may be a different beast altogether.

Risk, Failure, and Honesty

by Kent Aitken

---

Last year Nick and I went down a long rabbit hole on the idea of the faceless bureaucrat (see: Embracing Authenticity Means Embracing Complexity). There's a maxim that bureaucrats are rightly anonymous, in that it facilitates professional, non-partisan advice, but I've been wondering if the foundations on which that maxim rests are shifting. We're in an era of hyper-connectivity, citizen engagement in governance, and an increasing recognition that end users' needs should be the starting point for policy and program design. In other words:

• The public service (and the public, for that matter) is made up of people
• People not in government can be trusted, invaluable partners in governance
• The starting point for solutions should be a genuine understanding of the problem

All of which begets pretty fundamental questions about the relationship between government and citizens. One that Nick and I did not thoroughly cover is the approach government takes to honesty, problems, and failure.

Recently, David Emerson suggested that public service needed to adapt quickly to the state of the world, and the article was summed up with the headline that Public servants risk becoming policy dinosaurs. Is this a problem we have to face?

Well, the strongest language that we tend to admit to is that we face challenges and that there are risks. We don't have problems, we don't have failures. So it can't be a problem.

That said, over the last year, there has been talk about adopting Engineers Without Borders' Failure Report model, one Crown Corporation has admitted the need to reinvent its business model, and the idea of change labs has spread, a model dependent on a laser focus on problems, as well as experimentation and iteration based on past results, including failures.

It seems as though we recognize that honesty is needed about the problems that we're facing, so that we can bring to bear the appropriate resources to solve them. And yet, the language stays firmly fixated on opportunities and innovation, never on problems or failures. When multiple people approve documents, it becomes very likely that at least one of them will soften the language.

Innovation requires taking chances, and chances can lead to failures. Any system that involves humans, no matter how reliable, will generate mistakes as a matter of statistical inevitability. It's okay. And small failures, if done well, will contribute to consistent successes. And until a would-be innovator can as easily summon anecdotes of failures being accepted as being maligned, we're stuck with the safe road or, at least, pretending to others that we're on it. Either of which is exceedingly hard to learn from.

I think part of it is the Shopping for Votes approach: defenders of soundbite-based communication argue that average Canadians don't have time for complexity, and won't appreciate the nuances of real, gritty problems. To boot, every piece of even internal communication can suddenly become external through Access to Information. However,there is evidence that experts that own up to their shortcomings, or demonstrate a degree of fallibility, can be seen as more credible and reliable (and certainly more likable) than those who maintain an strictly stoic veneer. Nick once suggested that a culture of acceptable failure could be a competitive advantage.

And the decline in trust in government would suggest that in general, the problem-free communication approach isn't working ideally. It may be worth considering the possibility that we systematically overestimate the risk of admitting to problems and failures, and underestimate the longer-term risks of losing trust and credibility - and the risks of inappropriately intervening on ill-defined problems.

It could be a tragedy of the commons effect, in that individual actors know that long-term stewardship requires a certain approach but are incentivized to take a different one. In that view, it's not so much a question of whether we should embrace an honest focus on problems, or that our communications model needs to evolve, but a question of how we normalize those admissions of humility and humanity.

When everyone around you is touting success, who goes first on failure?

If it is a tragedy of the commons, the answer is less in the culture change and more in altering how the market works.

Failure as a Competitive Advantage

Whenever I speak about failure I try to re-position it as a competitive advantage:

What kind of organization would you rather work for? One that tries, fails, learns and tries again? Or one that never tries, never fails, never learns?

I ask the question because I think that these two organizations are on two radically different trajectories in terms of their ability to be innovative. Furthermore, in a hyper connected world my hypothesis is that talented people will self select to organizations that try, fail, learn, and try again, while the less talented will naturally gravitate towards the organizations who don't (i.e. atrophy doesn't require talent).

When was the last time you stopped to ask yourself what type of organization you work for?





Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect