If we don’t fail sometimes, then we don’t know what we’re good at.
We learn through failure. If we always succeed, then we don’t know what we did to succeed and we don’t learn. We miss the chance of feedback on doing something wrong. We want to know where and how we can improve our skills. Therefore we need to fail in order to succeed.
Ok, you don’t always want to fail, but you do need to be ready to accept the risk of failure, so that you learn more as you now and then move out of your comfort zone.
You know you can do better, failure offers reminders of where you need to practice and improve your skills.
Make it safe to fail for your people
Obviously, it is important, as far as is possible, to make it safe to fail. You can create places for failure in a range of places in both the workplace and classroom.
This is why it is so important to make the outcome of team collaborations not dependent on ‘successful’ products, but rather on successfully writing up the experience. It should be possible for a failed team to write up an exceptional report about their poor outcomes.
I had this happen once. A team started ok, but then imploded over the next few months as people left the degree for various reasons, while others became ill. In the end, there were two people who completed the report and finished what they could. They still passed the course, and graduated as they explained what happened, and how they tried to manage the outcomes, and what they learned from the experience. They had lots to say about how they would do it differently in the future.
Explore how you can create places where it’s safe for your people to fail, and learn from the experience.
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.