To Action: The Three Habits: Failure, Success, and Reflection

I’m guessing you’ve heard the age-old question – what came first, the chicken or the egg? (Spoiler Alert – it was the egg. Eggs were used by various life forms millions of years before the chicken existed).

Well, there’s another version that’s perhaps even trickier:

‘What came first, the culture or the ritual?’

Whichever side of the fence you’re on though, the answer really doesn’t matter because despite claims to the contrary, you can’t implement a new culture. What you can do, however, is implement new organisational rituals.

So that’s where you as a Change Leader need to focus your attention.

Before you can do this though, you first need to decided on the culture that you want to create.

I’ll humbly make a suggestion here – create a culture of openness.

To do so, there are three key areas you need to target. All three are centred on normalising what are typically difficult things.

They are: Failure, Success, and Reflection.

It’s by doing these three key habits well that you foster ongoing improvement in your organisation and your teams. To put it another way, to create a culture of openness and improvement, your teams and organisations:

  1. Must be able to fail, and learn,
  2. Must be able to succeed, and learn, and
  3. Must be able to share and make forecasts using those learnings.

So this week,

Take a moment to assess your team’s ability to fail, succeed and reflect.

What’s the weak spot of the three? – Target that first.