Patrick Adams  00:04

As leaders, it’s important as we’re thinking about the type of culture we want to create. We want to create a culture fail forward, type of culture to really think about the behaviors that we are displaying, both in front of our team members and behind. If we had the red, as I said, if we didn’t have any problem solving anything underneath it, that was an entirely different conversation. There’s no red. That means that we’re not trying, or we’re not learning, and that’s not okay, because that won’t move us forward. So it was again, that cultural piece where the leaders had to, they had to stick to it and celebrate the Reds as well as everybody else at some point, leaders just expect that mistakes are going to happen. Right if we’re experimenting, we’re encouraging it, and that’s part of having a fail forward culture. Hello and welcome to this episode of the lean solutions podcast. My name is Patrick Adams, and today I’m joined by one of my favorite hosts, Andy is one of my four favorite hosts of the lean solutions podcast, Andy Ulrich from Australia. Andy, it looks like you’re outside enjoying the sunshine today.

Andy Olrich  01:18

Yes, it’s very early morning. We’ve lost all power in the House and in the area. So I’m outside on the laptop in the backyard running off battery. So yeah, all right, we’ll get it done still. Just yeah, just get it done. Get make some adjustments and make it happen. I like it well, I can I can hear you, fine. I can see you, fine. So I think all is good. Hopefully everything’s okay with the power. I mean that that’s always difficult when you lose power. Yeah, a few trees down and things like that have caused a bit of havoc, but thankfully, no major damage around where I am. So that’s that’s good, okay, alright, well, yeah, that’s good. So hopefully get your power back here pretty soon. Well, I’m excited for this episode. Andy, we’re actually wrapping up a series

Patrick Adams  02:04

around just rethinking failure, or thinking about failure in a different way, reframing the word failure and really looking at it more as opportunity than like positive emotions, positive feelings kind of reframed versus negative feelings that we as humans naturally get when we fail. You know something when, when the result that we expected by doing something isn’t what we expected, we naturally feel a night, have a negative feeling. We want to reframe that and really think about things in a positive way and more around. What did we learn versus, you know, why did we are that negative feeling of failure? So the first, the first episode was where Catherine and I were on, and we the title of that was rethinking failure, and we highlighted a number of individuals that we all know, popular Michael Jordan and many others, Thomas Edison, just around their feeling of failure and how many, many failures led to, eventually to success. And then Shane and Catherine came back together, and they talked about learning from the trenches, where they talked about, again, just how, how in specific case, a case study type examples, how do we take these examples and really create a safe environment where people feel okay to try things which is going to increase the number of failures, but try new things, experiment, and then How do we respond appropriately as leaders, in order to, you know, encourage more of that, knowing that the result is going to be, you know, a positive learning culture, a good continuous improvement culture, where people feel safe to try things and continue to improve. And as you and I both know, the results of that are very high value for the company and the customers of the company. So today, Andy and I are going to talk about building a fail forward culture. And what does that mean to be a fail forward, right? It’s a little spin on fall forward, right? But fail forward so meaning, let’s, let’s take those failures and let’s actually use them as a stepping stone as a, as a, you know, a way to just launch us into a into a positive direction, forward direction. So Andy, what do you what are your thoughts on today’s topic, or this whole series around just failing in general, and really just reframing that feeling of what it means to fail.

Andy Olrich  04:44

Yeah, so important. I think it’s some of the best inventions have come from failures, mistakes, accidents, whilst whilst trying to develop or create something or solve a problem. So I think it’s really important, and it’s a real cultural maturity piece for me, where leaders are. Not surprised by failure. Or, you know, it’s a really negative thing. It’s like, okay, well, if there’s failure, they’re trying, and there’s an opportunity then to to learn from that. And and it just shows that people are either trying new things or testing the boundaries. Or, okay, well, we’ve, we’ve caught this. If it could be more severe, what can we do to make sure that we make it harder to get there next time? So it’s really great. Yeah,

Patrick Adams  05:28

and the we’ve talked a lot over the last few episodes around the behaviors of leaders. You know, how we how we set up a good culture that is open to experimentation. What are the behaviors that are necessary in order to create that type of culture, and then also helping guide team members through experimentation? You know, controlled experiments, and keeping ourselves safe, keeping our customers safe, and then also how we react when failure happens. And that’s it, probably one of the most important pieces. Because, you know, I think I mentioned in the episode with Catherine, you know that even you know that I sometimes get really frustrated when the same mistake happens over and over again, and I have to really step back and pause and and think about what, what culture Am I trying to create here? Do I want a fear based culture, where every time something bad happens, I’m as a leader, I’m just flying off the handle and and responding with, you know, anger and making people feel like they can’t experiment or they can’t try things, even though that’s not what I want. Am I making people feel that way based on how I respond? So I think that, you know, as leaders, it’s it’s important as we’re, we’re thinking about the type of culture we want to create, if we want to create a culture, a fail forward, type of culture, to really think about the behaviors that we are displaying, you know, both in front of our team members and and behind. And I think I, actually, I love this book. Richard Sheridan wrote that this is second book, Chief Joy officer, and he is the CEO of Menlo innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is also one of our tour locations for the Lean Solutions Summit. It was last year, and it will be this year again, because we’ll be in Detroit. So, you know, this is a great place to go meet Richard Sheridan, but there’s a couple things in this book that I thought were super valuable for our conversation. And if you’re okay with it, I want to read just a couple things here.

Andy Olrich  07:28

So I had the pleasure of meeting Richard. Of course. I went to the summit last year, and we went out to Menlo. And yeah, what a great guy. And yeah, certainly a big fan of his work. So, Leah, I’d love to dive into it.

Patrick Adams  07:37

Perfect. Okay, I think everybody that went on the tour actually got this book, or maybe his other book. I don’t remember, but okay, this is what it says in in a strong leadership culture, there’s there often isn’t a need for forgiveness, and certainly not for the kind of permission we so often see in a kind of boss LED or fear based culture, mistakes happen quickly and are corrected early. No blame committee is formed. The organization as a whole can acknowledge a mistake, maybe even laugh about it, correct it, and move on to make their next set of mistakes, discovering along the way the kind of deliberate improvements and happy accidents that help move a business forward. I love that. He said, happy accidents. And then he said, a culture of leaders expects mistakes. In this environment, leaders are equipped to deal with problems as they arise with little fanfare. They bring together teams to roll up their sleeves and work as a group to solve problems. They run new experiments to improve on old mistakes. At a certain point, you might want to wonder if bosses are ever even needed. And when he says bosses, he’s meaning like those you know, command and control kind of bosses, right? And to tell you what to do. So I think, I thought that was a really interesting point that he made. And just about, you know, he said, leader at some point, leaders just expect that mistakes are going to happen. Right? If we’re experimenting, we’re encouraging it, mistakes will happen. And that’s part of having a, you know, a fail forward culture.

Andy Olrich  09:20

Yeah, really, really, great. And I’ve been fortunate to work in an organization we talked about them as exceptional failures, and that was really about it was important, and leaders would go looking for if we weren’t calling out, you know, hey, tell us something that you might have messed up, or, you know, what mistake have you made this week, those sorts of things. And yeah, we would actually be encouraged to see the lighter side of it, if that was Yeah, possible, but it was yeah, they were actually formally in some of the daily stand up meetings. Was okay, here’s a shared success, okay, but what’s what hasn’t gone well? And what have we learned? And have we captured that in our in our lessons learned register? So there’s some really. Are awesome things that it’s not just a leader saying, Hey, it’s okay to fail, and yeah, let’s have a laugh about it. Like there’s these ceremonies where they’ll plug in a formal step or an activity and capture that document it somewhere, some other things that we did, and currently, what I’m working with now is actually what they call a seed funding budget for innovation type things. It’s basically some budget there to intentionally be used to experiment and try new things, and if it doesn’t work out, as long as we capture the lessons learned, and that’s serving its purpose. So it’s really again, it’s not just about the time or the visible support, but hey, here’s actually a bag of money, which, okay, simplistically, we can kind of blow it up, but as long as we learn from it, that’s exactly what that’s for. So it’s that reframing and our leaders are actually pushing us to do and spend and things, to make sure that we are pushing it and seeing what we can do to to to have that, you know, innovative leap or that breakthrough that changes everything. So, yeah, I love it. It’s exceptional. Failures. Was something that I use that term today still, and go, hang on, this is actually working out okay, because we’ve learned these other things. So and the Carter, right? When we do Carter, and we say, What did you What did you expect? What did you learn? So that experimentation, the scientific thinking, I think it’s, again, your mechanism there to call it out and make sure we capture it. So, yeah, yeah. I think it’s really important.

Patrick Adams  11:27

Yeah, I agree. And, you know, one of the things that Shane actually talked about in the last episode was psychological safety. And, you know, it’s important that we as leaders think about that in our organizations. You know, creating programs like the one that you just mentioned, helps people feel safe because they know that it’s being encouraged. There’s an actual, you know, tangible piece to that that says, No, go ahead, go ahead and move forward with this. You got it. You know, I remember working for a leader at an organization that we when we would run Kaizen events, he would, you know, basically do our kickoffs as the executive. And then he would give, you know, some boundaries, and basically say, you know, you guys have the ability to spend, you know, whatever, $2,000 or $5,000 or whatever it is, don’t even ask, Don’t even ask for permission, like this is your money. Spend it as you see fit. And I trust that you guys are going going to, you know, be good stewards of that and make good decisions. But use that money to experiment, to trial, to buy some things that you want to try out, you know, whatever it might be. And obviously anything outside of that wasn’t that. It was denied, but, you know, let’s, let’s have a good reason. You know, call me back in. We can talk about it if you’re looking to spend more than that. But it was kind of similar to that. It’s like, here’s, here’s a little bit of money just to just to go experiment with. And that really just opened up the doors for the team to feel comfortable and safe, you know, to be able to experiment without any repercussions. And so we think about psychological safety for learning and experimentation. There’s four things that that you know, really come to mind that I wanted to just kind of throw out there and maybe talk through a little bit. The first one is encouraging open dialog. So, you know, making sure that you’re creating environment where team, team members feel safe to voice their ideas, their concerns, right, even mistakes, without fear of judgment. So I think that that’s the first one is just encouraging that open dialog that create helps to create that, that safety net for people. The second one is modeling vulnerability so leaders that openly share their own learning experiences. Right as leaders, sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to be like, Yeah, I made a mistake here. In front of your team, you’re supposed to be the one that doesn’t make mistakes, or traditionally, you’re supposed to be the one but be involved, vulnerable enough to talk about your failures. And you know, here’s here’s a play area that I made a huge mistake, and here’s what I learned from it, that again, by modeling, that it opens up for other people to feel safe, to do the same. The third one focusing on learning, not blame. We’ve talked about that extensively in the last two episodes, but really tying in this the question of, what did we learn? Yes, we failed or we made a mistake. We didn’t have the exact outcome we wanted. When we talk about the learning now, all of a sudden, it’s no longer a negative. It’s a positive, because we can take that learning and apply it to other things, and then the last one is establishing clear boundaries, right, encouraging calculated risk with clearly defined boundaries, which is what I talked about. You know, the story that I mentioned about the the leader that gave us a, basically a financial boundary of being able to spend this, this kind of money, but being clear about what those boundaries are and not jeopardizing the safety of your team members or. Your customers, I think is a big part of that. So Andy, I wanted to throw it over to you kind of on those four areas, open dialog, modeling vulnerability, focusing on learning not blame, and establishing clear boundaries. Any of those stand out to you as being like, one that you would say is like really key in, in really providing psychological safety in a learning environment.

Andy Olrich  15:27

I think that, you know, the reduction or the removal of blame culture is so important when we have those moments where the leaders actually say, you know, it’s not the five who’s, it’s the five whys, it’s hey, if we did, you know, unintentionally mess up, it’s an opportunity to learn. And hey, I’ve, I’ve made those mistakes too. What’s, what’s, let’s challenge the system or the process, you know, something, whether it’s I’ve made the mistake or, you know, they move me on, and someone else comes in. If the system’s still got a gap there, then it could happen again or worse. So in that type of, you know, negative safety type incident. So I think if we know that we’re not, we’re going to be able to raise things that we’ve, you know, haven’t in our minds at the time, haven’t gone well, and we’re not going to be, you know, attacked personally for that. I think that’s so powerful for people to kind of just let go a little bit and go, Well, hey, this happened, and I’m just going to let you know, because I could happen to the next person, or, Hey, it didn’t quite go well, but we’ve got this thing now, and I think it might be worth looking into a bit more so. And we talk about Deming, you know, driving out that fear, the fear based culture and things like that. It just opens things up for people to raise silly ideas, as they would say, and then leading that into experimentation. And that’s how so again, I mentioned so many things in history, we’ve been doing things to maybe produce this outcome, and then something’s gone wrong. Wow, we’ve got this thing that, to this day, is absolutely fundamental and has helped so many people, so kick out the blame. It doesn’t. It doesn’t help people scared to raise things. They’ll hide things which could be quite more severe the next time around if we don’t capture that. And as I said, the challenge the system, because we’re human beings, and if the more we can be hard hate the hard on the problem and and easier on the person. I think we’re in a good spot. Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Adams  17:27

I agree completely. What would so one of the things we also talked about in the last two episodes was, you know, that that reframing piece of, you know, shifting failure from being a setback or a negative to more of an opportunity. And I was going to talk about, you know, a structured format for like, retrospectives on we I think we talked in the episode with Catherine. I think we talked about, you know, simply just asking, you know, what happened, what did we learn from it? And then, what are we gonna do differently next time? Great, you know, structure about three questions. I have another one for L’s retrospective, which I’ll talk about in a minute. But any any thoughts from you on how we can reframe failure? You know, is there anything that you’ve experienced, or ways that you can like strategies around, you know, just really creating a fail forward kind of mentality when a mistake happens. You know, how do you approach it? Because having structure around that, teaching your team some structure, versus just saying, hey, let’s do it. I mean, there’s, there’s a big difference, right? So, you know, any thoughts on that? One

Andy Olrich  18:41

of the, one of the things that really jumps to mind that I, I’ve been, I’ve experienced and worked within, was we in some of the very early lean training that they gave everyone in the organization. Was this whole mindset around red is good. So if we missed a KPI or a target, and the card was red on an sqdc framework that we used to use for our daily, weekly stand ups. That was to be it was called that active list, like, don’t, don’t see that as a negative. What we should be looking at is, if it’s always green and hey, what’s maybe we’re not looking at the right things, or maybe we’re not stretching enough. So it was really about we’d have the red, but then we would have the cascading. We would we would capture, you know, how much we missed by, let’s say, but then where was that occurrence? So in what category, and then straight after that is a five why. So there’s immediately, it’s like, recognize it. How far off were we? Where did this happen? But then jump in with the team straight away and do that five wise exercise, just to get the thinking and and really driving to root cause, and then what are we going to do about it? So was that they were given not only the structure and the format, but also that active license. Hey, when this happens, grab the team. We will celebrate you to call and show us that red card when I walk in. I might never know what it is yet, but I can see. It, and then we can drill down. And the team themselves are really interrogating, hey, we’re all here at that moment. What do you reckon happened here? So let’s lock that in, and then at any time, people could go back to that, that area now, war room or a bay room, as you call them. But we can all then learn from Hey, this happened and and maybe, you know, others can provide ideas for solutions. So that was really about, you know, red is good, green is is kind of seen as if it’s always green, then we need to have a think about and it’s not great. So I that really gave us license to not only call it out, but we would say, turn your turn a whinge. So if some would say, Oh, this is not working, or we’ve missed it, turn it into winning, how do we then go capture and again, if people didn’t know how to do a five wires, or it wasn’t enough to really dig into the root cause, opportunity to learn, hey, I’m trying to do this five wires. I’m not really sure leaders could look at the structure and the flow and go, Okay, oh, hang on. We might need to do a little bit more training there. Training there, or we need to crank it up a bit and get a more sophisticated tool or resource in to help us really dive into that. So because we see that in the eyes of our customers, internal, external, that we’ve missed it, that’s a great thing, because we can catch this now, and if we deal with it in the moment, we’ve got a lot better chance. And we’ve got this bucket of things that went wrong on the wall, and we look at them once every three months. So that’s just one example where the organization, again, with some visible tools support and the structure of what drove our meetings there wasn’t if there was something called out as a red and they hadn’t then cascaded down into problem solving and corrective actions. Hang on, guys, this is we’re not learning. This could hit us again because we said we’re going to do that. So that was it just kind of took the shackles off and leaders, yeah, if they weren’t seen as making sure the failures ended up on that that system, then they weren’t doing their jobs. So that that’s one really powerful example, and the other is just the retrospectives. I find them. You know, it’s quick, snappy, those three key questions, yeah, changes the whole culture, because we’re not, we’re not hiding it or sending an email over here, or writing it on a board there. It’s like, give us the framework and the time, and we’ll show you, and we’ll help you get out of this mess, or we’ve got a new product we never even thought we’re going to do, and it’s up there, and we can talk about it when you’re ready. So, right, right,

Patrick Adams  22:30

yeah, it’s, it’s funny that you mentioned the red green, because I think there are so many organizations that implement, you know, red green for their KPIs. And, you know, where I’ve been, I’ve seen companies that have more of a fear based culture, and they try to do that and meet in sometimes it backfires because they haven’t done the upfront work to, you know, reframe what red means. You know, they’ve always, they’ve always felt like red is bad and, and I remember one, one leader who, you know, whenever he would have executives coming into that organization and they were going to do a tour, he would be, you know, switching his cards to green because he didn’t want to have to explain why, you know, or deal with being yelled At, or the negative, you know, the negative feel that he would get when they would come in. And that’s a, that’s a whole nother issue. You know, we could probably do a whole episode on the psychology, this psychology behind the red, green and but I love that you guys had a culture where, you know, it was just a conversation. It wasn’t, wasn’t something that made people feel bad. It was know that we have a we have a structured approach, and when there is red, here’s what we do, and we’re going to have a conversation about it, and nobody feels there’s any blame or anything like that. It’s just, let’s figure out what we what did we learn, and what are we going to do next? So I think that’s super powerful, good structure.

Andy Olrich  23:59

I love. Yeah, I laugh with the switching of the cards. Or just, just make that one a green because XYZ is coming in. Had a really good leader that would, he’d be clever enough to, sort of, you know, sniff that out if that had been happening, and if it was all green every time that they came in, it’s like, as I said, there was that thing around. What’s going on here? Okay, am I not setting high enough stretch targets for you guys? So we that actually got us a little bit more if we’re always green, we’d be a little bit more worried about that than if we could have this showing that this is this is learning in action here with this red. If we had the red, as I said, and we didn’t have any problem solving anything underneath it, that was an entirely different conversation. But yeah, there’s no red. That means that we’re not trying, or we’re not learning, or we’re not someone’s staying quiet, and that’s not okay, because that won’t move us forward. So it was, again, that cultural piece where the leaders had to, they had to stick to it and and celebrate the Reds as well as

Patrick Adams  24:56

as everybody else. So yes, yeah, and I love. Love that you said celebrate, because we’re going to talk about that here in just a second. I want to go back to what I mentioned about the four L’s retrospective, because I again, I think there it’s good to have different structures in place so that your team knows how to approach these things. And while we were talking, you mentioned PDCA too, and I love and Kata. You mentioned kata too. They have their rapid PDCA learning cycle that you know, that you go through in one of those columns that you’re filling out is answering the question, what did we learn as part of their structure, right? So, four hours retrospective, you know, we’ll throw up four questions on the wall, give everybody post it notes. And you know, we’re going to reflect on whatever it is that we’re talking about. Now, this is more this is a larger scale reflection period. Maybe not something you would do for some for a small mistake or small thing, but potentially, I don’t know. But one question is, what do you like about whatever happened or whatever process we’re looking at. That’s the first L. The second one is, what do we lack? What are we missing, you know, from the process or from whatever it is. The next one is, what what do you what did you learn in the process, or what did you learn from whatever it is? And then the last one is, what do you long for? What would you like to see in the future, right? So it’s a great way to again, just frame up reflection, a structured reflection, of whatever it is you’re looking at. And walking team members through that process can really help them to take a step back, and instead of, you know, having blinders on or being too focused, actually take a step back and really discuss what actually happened. What do we like? What do we lack? What do we long for? What did we learn in this process? Just another example. So

Andy Olrich  26:51

it’s great those prompting, prompting questions, and they’ve got these key buckets where people can just focus and then go, Okay, well, what do I like about this? Okay, maybe nothing, or maybe everything about it. So I think that’s, yeah, again, that’s what I love about this stuff. We give them the time and a bit of a framework. The rest is the magic from your team. So I, I try and a lot of those ways, a good way to and it’s captured somewhere. It’s not just a con, just a chat, and everyone just marches off to back to work. So,

Patrick Adams  27:20

right, yeah, exactly. Well, and that’s, that’s a whole nother thing. You know, you got to do something with it. So what did we learn and now, what are we going to change? What do we do differently in order to take what we learned and apply it so that it doesn’t keep happening? Yeah, you also mentioned celebrating, celebrating the wins. I think it’s helpful sometimes to talk about, you know, tools that we can use in order to celebrate the the wins, right? Or celebrate learnings from failures, you know, making sure that we have that this goes back to those behaviors, leadership behaviors, that are creating that, that learning culture. So I don’t know, do you have any thoughts around how to help celebrate wins?

Andy Olrich  28:08

And, yeah, just a little story An executive I’ve worked with, he actually is very passionate in this space. And he talked about a leadership training way, you know, years ago, when he was working at a university, quite, quite young, but they actually went through a leadership training, and they part of that was teaching them to juggle. And I’m not sure whether you’ve heard of this before, but the process was, is every time you dropped the ball, you had to clap, and then you’d pick the ball up, and then you’d have another go, and each time you had to clap, and there’s people watching, if you didn’t clap when you drop the ball, then, hey, you’re not actually recognizing that. That was a moment there where you something hasn’t gone well, and an opportunity to learn. So it was really saying as leaders, yeah, if and he found it so difficult to clap because he wanted to get it, and other people were doing better than him, but it was just like that, that mental piece there where it was just to say, hey, we’ve got to celebrate these things. So the reframing for him was powerful. And he tells that story a lot, which is, which is kind of cool and and he’s then saying, Look, if I’m not exhibiting that, when you’re having failures, the way that we, as I said, we had the exceptional failures, and you’d have a lessons learnt register, if we had a lessons learnt, and then it would say, Okay, we don’t know what to do. Has anybody got any ideas on how we could stop that from happening again, or how we could take that forward and actually make an improvement? Those types of ideas would be in a kind of in a sub bucket for our reward and recognition program. So it was really bad. Instead of you just out on the floor and you think, Oh, this is probably a good probably a good idea, or this is, I think this might help us down the track, she gave a little bit more weight into those ones that were dealing with something that actually happened, and we wanted to promote that. So in that reward and recognition piece, it was quite a powerful driver. It’s like, not only have we given you time and space and. A place to put these lessons learned. But if you can come up with an idea with a team, and we can actually go on and make the improvement and demonstrate it’s either reduce the risk or eliminate it, or made a step change across a few other things that one’s going to have a little bit more magic dust on it, and there was the financial or, you know, other types of recognition tied to that. So again, promotion of don’t hide this stuff because someone walking through a doorway and didn’t recognize a forklift until it was driving past them, for example, that could be far more severe if we don’t didn’t just call that out and go with the reason why I didn’t notice the forklift is because we’ve got this covered there. And you know that we don’t, they just drive around, sort of a thing. So that tying it into the why it’s important and what, and part of that also was to say, Well, what do you think you know with, again, with Carter is, what do you expect? So it was a little moment there to say, well, this happened, but what could happen was, or what I fear could it could be more severe again, it ties into that. Why around, why we need to get together and capture the ideas and then go on again and experiment so that reward and recognition piece we know is so important with any sort of continuous improvement culture, but targeting that and mate that that was basically another force way, in some regards, to get the lessons learned on a page, because there’s some, there’s a little bit more in it for them than just, oh, we’re going to help people and make it better. So that’s, that’s a great example of work really. Well, yeah,

Patrick Adams  31:31

well, and I love when companies take stories like that from employees that have experimented, and, you know, maybe the result wasn’t what they expected, but they they create kind of storytelling platforms where these employees have the ability to to talk to their team members about what they learn in that process, and actually creating a platform for that. I also, I’ve heard of companies that create a failure of the month board, where they celebrate learnings from failures and will highlight an employee and the story behind that. I think, I think that’s kind of cool too. Again, just to promote the that it’s okay for us to try things and for them to not work out the way we expected, as long as we learn something from it, right?

Andy Olrich  32:21

You’ve just reminded me of something. Do you have you ever heard of terms like the pineapple room or getting a pineapple if you mess up? Or is that just an Australian thing? Have you heard? I have not heard that. Fill me in. Okay, okay, so I’ll try and do this at a at a level. So it’s like if something happened and you did the wrong thing. There’s a term that we use down here. It’s called, you go into copper pineapple and a pint, you know, the pineapple is probably not the smoothest looking fruit you’ve ever seen. And there’s a green end where the Yeah, and then there’s the fruit bit that you eat. So it was always a bit of a laugh to say, Oh, I’ve got to go in there and get a pineapple from the boss, which means you’re going to get, you’re going to have a conversation that’s not going to be great, and you’re going to get that may be getting yelled at or or disciplined, or whatever. It was, just a way that we frame it down here. But the thing is, if they’re a nice boss, the pineapple, it’s a metaphorical term for the pineapple gets put somewhere uncomfortable. And it was like, well, if they’re a good boss, they’ll let you pick which end first. So there you go. There’s the thing I’m going and, and the big boss’s room is called, or a HR room is called the pineapple room. It’s like, Oh, I saw Andy in the pineapple room the other day. I don’t know what he’s done, but he was in there. So, but what we did at one organization was, is we were in in Kmart, and there was these little pineapple statues that were painted gold. So, you know, fruit ornaments that you can put somewhere. So we actually had the golden pineapple award. And what we do is, if any of us in the office there had a had a, yeah, we stuffed up in a meeting or, you know, we got into a bit of strife, we would actually, whoever had the pineapple at the time would have license to then go, you know, I present you, and put this on this desk so people could go around and see the golden pineapple on the desk. Now, that was a lot. Was a lot of fun and help us see the lighter side of things not going well. But it was also an opportunity to go, how did you get that? What happened there? What did you Why have you got the pineapple? Pete? And say, Oh, look. What happened was so it was just another thing for us in the leadership space to go, Oh, that wasn’t great in you. I messed up. But yeah, and the leaders were okay with as long as we didn’t have, like, the court, the global executives coming in, going, why is this golden pineapple award happening? So, yeah, that, that was a funny story. But yeah, in Australia, we talk about, oh no, I’m going to get a pineapple for this. It’s just a, there you go. Maybe I

Patrick Adams  34:39

love it. It’s, a great way that, that you, that you balanced accountability with compassion, right? You’re kind of making light of things, but also holding people accountable, like we’ve set some clear expectations, and, you know, it didn’t happen. So, you know, there’s, there’s that piece of like. Accountability, but also the compassion of understanding. We’re all human, and we make mistakes and kind of making a little bit light of it at the same time. I like it. It’s good, very cool. Separating the the person from the problem, too, I think, is key when it comes to accountability and really making sure that, you know, we we’ve talked a lot about this in past episodes, but blaming the process, not the person too, right? I mean, yes, the pineapple is sitting on my desk, but it but the problem, you know, was the issue, or the the process is where the the issue was not in the person, right? So I think that’s a that’s a good example, for sure, what about communication Andy? Where does communication and feedback? Where does that come into play in reinforcing a learning culture?

Andy Olrich  35:52

There’s several mechanisms that come to mind. So if we talk in the safety space, part of the process of reporting a near miss or a hazard or an incident, there is a, not only getting to root cause and some evidence around what happened, but also Lessons Learned next steps. You know, there’s an action plan that’s in there and that’s visible to all. It’s not, traditionally, it works better if it’s not buried in a, you know, an IoT system somewhere, and you have to actually go in there, like there was some again, the sqdc process was great for that. Used to have quite a story that at high level, and you could find out more. I think also when we do things around so we have, obviously the safety alerts again, where things go out and we communicate, or toolbox talks, it’s definitely a moment to talk about them. But also when you’re having retrospectives, I think it’s really important around you know, some things that went well, there’s this again, there’s that moment where they you would actually capture those positives that have come out of it, or giving people a backstory as to how you’ve ended up with a new product or a prototype that you’re testing. I think that’s really important. So not only capturing in the day to day, I guess, operations of the business, there’s reward and recognition. There’s, you know, might go out in a newsletter or things like that, and I found really powerful is having all those things written or captured somewhere. But where I’ve found it, it’s landed with me the most is actually having that person come and talk to the group, or take you out there, or you go to them and they can show you exactly where this thing happened, or what we’ve Yeah, where it’s gone wrong. It just, for me, it just resonates a lot more when you’ve got that person again, you support them, and it encourages them to tell their story, share the learnings, and if you’ve got any other questions, you can ask them, because they were they’re involved. So again, we go to GEMBA, that two way communication between leaders and their teams is everything might be going all right in the day, but then you might be able to talk to them about a particular thing that happened last week, or although so and I think across one thing. So working in a water utility, the way that I spend my time is quite a collaborative network. So again, they’re monopoly organizations. We’re not chasing each other’s customers so much, but we do spend time and we actually call out, and we need to do it more as like, here’s some things that went wrong, or here’s some things that we’ve learned, especially in the innovation space, for sort of the space that I orbit in. So again, having those networks being open to sharing some state secrets with other organizations. I think that’s powerful. So yeah, there’s a lot in there again, but I just find that that’s Yeah, real stories. I think that has the cut through, as opposed to statistics and and just Yeah, words on a page. So yeah,

Patrick Adams  38:37

absolutely no. I agree 100% I love testimonies, stories of team members, what they’ve actually done. I mean that to tie in a story into anything that you’re trying to communicate to a group, it makes it memorable. It makes it real. It makes it you know, if you can have a level of emotion that gets kind of put into that based on the feelings that someone received when they, you know, experimented and, you know, learned, x, y, z, whatever it is. So I agree, definitely tying in stories. And I mentioned this briefly, but I think leaders also have to create clarity too, like, you know, something that for us just makes sense in our mind, like, you know, if I want to go from x to y, like in my mind, as a leader, I might, I might see the path very clearly. I might see what y looks like, and have that vision in my mind, and it may be just very clear for me, but getting the team to see what I see is important. And so there has to be clarity around communication. And, you know, I have to ensure that I’ve communicated it properly. You know, goals, the vision where we’re heading. Because what we don’t want to happen is for people to be experimenting and trying to take us in. In a different direction than what, you know, we have planned to go in. We want experiments and learnings to drive us towards closer to whatever that vision is or that end goal. So, you know, really creating clear communicating clear expectations, and getting clarity around where we’re heading the direction. I mean, that’s our job as leaders. In order to do that, so that the team members are able to experiment and try new things to help drive us, you know, closer to that, that vision? Yeah, so I think that’s an important part. Yeah,

Andy Olrich  40:34

I think it’s so important. And we touched on boundaries before, where it’s like clarity of here’s where we’re going. Generally find that a lot of organizations won’t set their KPIs to 100% of x or zero, you know, they strive for. But usually the realistic KPIs, there is actually a little buffer there recognizing that, hey, we, we, we are not going to get it right every time, if we do it more than what we we can show you up here is why we set it at that then we trigger conversations, we capture we go into that space, but yeah, there’s just like, here’s the here’s the playground, here’s the fence. You’re a team, you’re on the field. You can, as long as you stay within that and get to the try line. We’re here, but if we kick it over the fence or we’re going backwards, we’ll see that sooner rather than later. And hey, let’s why is that happening? Let’s capture that so yeah, boundaries and clarity, it’s just so important. And as you said, Some leaders have done the job before. They’re just like, yeah, all we need to do is go from here to here, whereas new people, or if they’ve got three or four other things that they’re trying to do. Yes, it can be tough,

Patrick Adams  41:43

right? Absolutely well, and when you have those clear boundaries and clarity around where we’re heading, it’s also a lot easier to to have a level of accountability. You know, when we’re when we are off track or when we’re heading in the wrong direction, it’s a lot easier for us to have that conversation, versus, you know, having no boundaries or no clarity. It’s like, how can you really hold people accountable, right in an environment like that? So I think that’s a that’s a key part for sure. Andy, we have to wrap up here. We’re kind of at the end of our time and and great conversation. I think this whole series has been great on, you know, just reframing what it means to fail. And you know, if you go back two episodes, you’ll, you’ll hear Catherine and I talking about rethinking failure and just really, just defining failure in a different way. And then Shane and Catherine both talked about learning from the trenches in the last episode. And then here we are really just kind of talking about the structure and what can happen if we have a fail forward type of culture. And so we’d love to hear from you on your experiences in learning from failure. If you’re listening to this on LinkedIn, or if you’re listening to it on your favorite podcast platform, feel free to drop a comment in and ask some questions or throw some examples of ideas of where you’ve learned from your failures, because we’d love to hear hear that as well. Andy, it’s been great to chat with you and look forward to catching up with you another time, but definitely appreciate appreciate you popping in and talking to our listeners about failing and learning and creating those opportunities going forward. So I appreciate you. No

Andy Olrich  43:37

problem. Thanks, Patrick, it’s good chat again.