Failure Is What I Did, Not Who I Am

Thank you.

I'm so excited to be here.

I wanted to start with your years in the innovation field and What you noticed about people who would leave these workshops and they have all these new ideas and possibilities.

And then when it came time to really take that risk or accept that something wasn't working, why do you think that the fear of failure still just has such a big hold on so many of us? There's

a million thoughts going through my mind.

But I think a big one is the culture set up, either on a team level or on a company level, to support.

I'll call it smart risk-taking because I do like to say no one's talking about reckless risk here, but smart risk-taking.

So it's the culture.

set up to support that.

Part of the work I do is around psychological safety, that belief that it's safe to speak up about ideas, mistakes, failures without fear of punishment or blame.

And so a lot of times I would find that People would come to my workshops and my team and I would upskill them with innovation skills and capabilities.

But when they left us, they returned to their team culture that perhaps was not always set up to support that smart risk-taking.

Thinking about actually my graduate school capstone, which was focused on the barriers that organizational leaders face when learning from failure.

And then innovating again that I really actually saw play out.

And it talked about three barriers, one of which was organizational.

So that probably speaks to what kind of incentives are in place.

And are those incentives rewarding smart risk taking? Are they rewarding certainty? And are they punishing failure? There's also interrelational or social barriers.

What are my relationships like with my team members? People might leave my workshops, but if they return to a team where the relationships were such that they didn't feel comfortable or safe to, again, take that risk.

Because what if it doesn't work out? And what are my colleagues going to think of me? And so, right, that fear of failure comes into play there because I'm worried and I'm worried about what my colleagues are going to think of me and perhaps think of me negatively afterwards.

And then there's that personal barrier, which we can all have.

I think even the best of us, maybe even Mother Teresa a little bit, we can all have a little ego.

You know, is that how do I think or feel about myself when I have failed or made a mistake or something didn't go as planned? And perhaps I, of course, played a role in that.