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:
- Must be able to fail, and learn,
- Must be able to succeed, and learn, and
- 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.
