Personally, the most trustworthy indicator of #team #culture is the treatment of failure. Unfortunately, most organizations can’t see or don’t see the opportunity that failure presents. A mentor told me about his teams’ phenomenally simple and effective handling of individual failure: the Fail Whale. 🐳 How it works is each team selects an object that serves as their “fail whale trophy”. When a failure event happens, you get to take possession of the trophy for your desk from the current owner to celebrate. Example: you accidentally release an update before it’s ready. You get to claim the whale! The Fail Whale is powerful for a myriad of reasons: 1. Speeds communication that a potential setback to team or personal objectives has occurred 2. Encourages pursuit of learning moments 3. Disassociates the failure from the HUMAN behind it 4. Crowd sources the shaping of default behavior, avoids the temptation to fix through innovation killing rules 5. Easy material for retrospectives 6. IT’S CHEAP! 7. Places you on the doorstep of measuring failure and change actions ("Boss, here’s this cycle’s breakdown of team changes and product enhancements we pursued to get better. You can do this on your own by filtering on the #FailWhale tag") So, what’s your team’s fail whale? 🐳
Love this. Humans make mistakes and the sooner we can all roll with that and extend kindness and humor along the way, the better off we all will be!
Very cool perspective. Thanks for sharing!
Love it!
Veteran | Product Guy | Unlicensed Therapist for Teams
7moI’ve gotten some great offline feedback about this approach. Couple call outs I think are worth making: - This approach WILL FAIL if managers and executives never seem to have the whale - While it could be a sign for concern, you can pick another representative name that doesn’t have the word ‘fail’ in it should that feel uncomfortable - It still can work virtually by using the status feature of Teams/Slack, pinning threads, etc - If the whale suddenly stops changing hands, it doesn’t necessarily mean ppl don’t want to do it. It could be that the conditions for learning from it aren’t there, removing a key reminder that “the program” exists