Ho‘ohana Aloha

The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.

And…

The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — is that it misrepresents the psychological reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is when we learn from our mistakes. Because unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong — that surge of Pe activity a few hundred milliseconds after the error, directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore — the mind will never revise its models. We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence. Samuel Beckett had the right attitude: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Same in the workplace. The rub? Employees know they aren’t students anymore, and know they are expected to be competent. They consider their managers to be their “next teachers” to a much more limited degree —- unless the work culture created by an Alaka‘i Manager helps them feel differently, safe to make those mistakes necessary in learning, for the learning should never stop.

In the Talking Story archives: Failure isn’t cool. Neither is weakness

Mark Fuller, CEO of WET Design, sounds like a leader who has fun leading his company toward excellence: How’s that for a novel concept, fun? It shouldn’t be… if managing and leading your team isn’t enjoyable for you, you really should do something else.

Snippets of his interview with Adam Bryant:

I really love coming to work to develop the workplace and the team. I think it’s either a virtuous or a vicious spiral, and it’s exposed when you go to hire somebody.

To get really good talent, you need to be doing interesting stuff. Take a great kid out of college or somebody from another company — they’re not going to come if there’s not something really interesting to work on. I suppose you could throw gobs of money at them or something, but that’s not the idea. So you need to build the company so you have great talent, and great projects, and a great environment. You get those three, and then they just feed off of each other.

And this sounds like a philosophy similar to the one we have for the Daily Five Minutes:

Q. Why improv?

A. Improv, if properly taught, is really about listening to the other person, because there’s no script. It’s about responding. I was noticing that we didn’t have a lot of good communication among our people.

And about ideas, and expecting mistakes:

We also encourage people to put their ideas on our walls… The point is to get people to put their stuff out where other people can see it. We don’t want a culture of, “That’s my idea. I don’t want anybody to see it. Maybe they’ll find a flaw in it.”

…So one of the things I will do is to start some meetings by saying, “Let me tell you where I just screwed up.” That sets the tone of, we’ve got to put our mistakes out there. They don’t call it “learn by trial and success.” You learn by trial and error.

Great advice from Martin…

Nobody’s perfect.  We all make mistakes.

That’s good.  Without mistakes, we wouldn’t have successes.

But it’s not easy to spot mistakes when they’re based on larger concepts.  The situation may be different each time, but your actions may be the same.  You need to be on your guard.

1. You have too many things going on at once

2. You’re too dependent

3. You silently sort out other people’s messes

4. You do anything else just to ignore the important stuff

5. You put yourself down

Read more about each one…