Learn through failure and many small wins
Failure leads to success if you try for small wins along the way. I realised from a comment that my previous thoughts on this topic left out a step. I forgot to say that in learning through failure I will have some success along the way, and that it will be fail, fail, success, fail, success, fail, fail, success, success… and so on.
When we try something: apply what we know to a task, we sometimes move into new territory and try new things. Things we have heard about, seen, or hypothesised. We do a small experiment to see if it works as expected, or if we achieve different results.
This image, and lots of others from Hugh McLeod make me think more. He often has a useful idea in the words.
If we succeed, and it goes as expected, then we know it works. However, we don’t always know if our reasoning was correct, or we got lucky. When we fail in the experiment, then we go over what we did more carefully. We check our premises, and assumptions looking for the ‘thing’ we did incorrectly. It might be a setting, or that something was not in the right place. Eventually, we set up another experiment, and run it. Now, if it succeeds, then we know more than before because we have looked more carefully at what we did to make it work.
This careful review of how set up the experiment means we pay more attention to the conditions. We are more focused, and catch small mistakes before we try the experiment.
This is why we learn success through failure. We fail a bit, we learn, we try again, we succeed. This success is built on learning from previous failures. We learn what we did wrong, modified our actions, and tried again. And again.
Teach your people to pause and learn from their mistakes and successes.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration. Also available via Kindle.