Prepare to fail on route to where we want to go

wise words from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch:

At different times in our lives, both of us (Chip and Dan) were urged by our significant others to take salsa-dancing lessons. This was not our first choice of weekend activities, but we agreed to give it a shot. The fantasy was an attractive one – we could picture ourselves with our partners, full of passion and artistic flair, drawing envious glances from passersby. No question: This “dancer identity” had appeal.

It did not take as long to realize how deeply misguided our fantasies were. All too quickly, we discovered that salsa is a sadistic style of dancing created for the purpose of making middle-aged men feel ridiculous. Salsa requires an array of sensual hip movements that we found structurally implausible. We managed to perform this beautiful dance with all the seductive force of Al Gore giving a lap dance.

We did not continue with our salsa lessons.

Here’s the thing: When you fight to make your switch, especially one that involves a new identity, you and your audience are going to have Salsa Moments. (Don’t worry, we’re not going to adopt that as a buzz phrase.) Any new quest, even one that is ultimately successful, is going to involve failure. You can’t learn to salsa-dance without failing. You can’t learn to be an inventor, or a nurse, or a scientist, without failing. Nor can you learn to transform the way products are developed in your firm, or change minds about urban poverty, or restore loving communication with your spouse, without failing. And the Elephant really, really hates to fail.

This presents a difficulty for you when you’re trying to change or when you’re trying to lead change. You know that you or your audience will fail, and you know that the failure will trigger the “flight” instinct, just as the two of us fled our salsa lessons. How do you keep the Elephant motivated when it faces a long, treacherous road?

The answer may sound strange: You need to create the expectation of failure – not the failure of the mission itself, but failure on route. This notion takes us into a fascinating area of research that is likely to change the way you view the world.

Read the following four sentences, and write down whether you agree or disagree with each of them:

1. You are a certain kind of person, and there is not that much that can be done to really change that.
2. No matter what kind of person you are, you can always change substantially.
3. You can do things differently, but the important parts of who you are can’t really be changed.
4. You can always change basic things about the kind of person you are.

If you agreed with items 1 and 3, you’re someone who has a “fixed mindset.” And if you agreed with items 2 and 4, you tend to have a “growth mindset.” (If you agreed with both 1 and 2, you’re confused.) As we’ll see, which mindset you have can help determine how easy it will be for you to handle failure, and how dogged you’ll be in pursuing change. It might even determine how successful you are in your career.

People who have a fixed mindset believe that their abilities are basically static. Maybe you believe you’re a pretty good public speaker, an average manager, and a wonderful organizer. With a fixed mindset, you believe that you may get a little bit better or worse at those skills, but basically your abilities reflect the way your wired. Your behavior, then, is a good representation of your natural ability, just as the swirled-and-sniffed first taste of wine is a good representation of the bottle you’ve bought.

If you are someone with a fixed mindset, you tend to avoid challenges, because if you fail, you fear that others will see your failure as an indication of your true ability and see you as a loser (just as bad first taste of wine leads you to reject the bottle). You feel threatened by negative feedback, because it seems as if the critics are saying they’re better than you, positioning themselves that a level of natural ability higher than yours. You try not to be seen exerting too much effort. (People who are really good don’t need to try that hard, right?) Think about tennis player John McEnroe as a young star – he had great natural talent but was not keen on rigorous practice or self-improvement.

In contrast, people who have the growth mindset believe that abilities are like muscles – they can be built up with practice. That is, with concerted effort, you can make yourself better at writing or managing or listening to your spouse. With the growth mindset, you tend to accept more challenges despite the risk of failure. (After all, when you try and fail to lift more weight at the gym, you don’t worry that everyone will mock you as a “born weakling.”) You seek out “stretch” assignments at work. And you’re more inclined to accept criticism, because ultimately it makes you better. You may not be as good as others right now, but you’re thinking long-term, in a tortoise-versus-hare kind of way. Think Tiger Woods, who won eight major championships faster than anyone in history and then decided his swing needed an overhaul.

Fixed versus growth: Which are you? This isn’t one of those Cosmo Personality Quizzes in which there are no wrong answers (“Are you a Labrador retriever or a poodle?”). Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, has spent her career studying these two mindsets – she is the source of the terms. And her research results are clear: If you want to reach your full potential, you need a growth mindset. (161-164 from Switch by Chip and Dan Heath)

And more from Switch on the importance of preparing to fail en route:

In the business world, we implicitly reject the growth mindset. Business people think in terms of two stages: You plan, and then you execute. There’s no “learning stage” or “practice stage” in the middle. From the business perspective, practice looks like poor execution. Results are the thing: We don’t care how ya do it, just get it done!

But to create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. You’ve got to embrace a growth mindset and instill it in your team. Why is that so critical? Because, as Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter observes in studying large organizations, “Everything can look like a failure in the middle.” A similar sentiment is expressed by marriage therapist Michele Weiner-Davis, who says that “real change, the kind that sticks, is often three steps forward and two steps back.”

If failure is a necessary part of change, then the way people understand failure is critical. The leaders at IDEO, the world’s preeminent product design firm, have designed products and experiences ranging from the first Apple mouse to a new Red Cross blood donation procedure. They understand the need to prepare their employees – and, more important, their clients – for failure.

Tim Brown, the CEO of IEDO, says that every design process goes through “foggy periods.” One of IEDO’s designers even sketched out a “project mood charge” that predicts how people will feel at different phases of a project. It’s a U-shaped curve with the peak of positive emotion, labelled “hope,” at the beginning, and a second peak of positive emotion, labelled “confidence,” at the end. In between the two peaks is a negative emotional valley labelled “insight.”

Brown says that design is “rarely a graceful leap from height to height.” When a team embarks on a new project, team members are filled with hope and optimism. As they start to collect data and observe real people struggling with existing products, they find that new ideas spring forth effortlessly. Then comes the difficult task of integrating all those fresh ideas into a coherent new design. At this “insight” stage, it’s easy to get depressed, because insight doesn’t always strike immediately.

The project often feels like a failure in the middle. But if the team persists through this valley of angst and doubts, it eventually emerges with a growing sense of momentum. Team members begin to test out their new designs, and they realize the improvements they’ve made, and they keep tweaking the design to make it better. And they come to realize, we’ve crack this problem. That’s when the team reaches the peak of confidence.

Notice what team leaders at IEDO are doing with the peaks-and-valley visual: They are creating the expectation of failure. By telling team members not to trust that initial flush of good feeling at the beginning of the project, because what comes next is hardship and toil and frustration. Yet, strangely enough, when they delivered this warning, it comes across as optimistic.

That’s the paradox of the growth mindset. Although it seems to draw attention to failure, and in fact encourages us to seek out failure, it is unflaggingly optimistic. We will struggle, we will fail, we will be knocked down – but throughout, we ‘ll get better, and will succeed in the end.

The growth mindset, then, is a buffer against defeatism. It reframes failure as a natural part of the change process. And that’s critical because people will persevere only if they perceive falling down as learning rather than as failing. (p 168-169, Switch by Chip and Dan Heath)