Patrick Adams  00:00

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Lean Solutions podcast. We are in season four, and we are kicking off this year in style, Catherine and I are here, and we’re going to talk about failures, you know, just looking back at 2024 and thinking about, you know, all the amazing things that happen, I think it’s also important that, you know, I think about some of the struggles, some of the challenges that we had to overcome in 2024 because that really becomes this springboard for us coming into this next year to go, Okay, what did let’s reflect, and let’s think about the things that we did this last year, and how is that going to help us to be successful in this next year? Right? So many of us right now are kind of in this mode of, you know, what are we going to do this next year that’s going to be different than last year? And so it’s a perfect opportunity for us to talk about the subject of failure, and that’s going to be today’s episode. It’s titled rethinking failure, and we’re shifting the narrative failure as a teacher, not an enemy. So Catherine, what are your thoughts on failure as a whole? I mean, what where do we start with this one? What do you think?

Catherine McDonald  01:38

Hi, Patrick, I think we start with the title, actually, because I think it’s a really good way to look at failure and help us understand how we think about failure, because how we manage failure is largely, I suppose, related to how we think about it. So if we think about failure as something negative, well then we’re obviously going to get caught up in negative emotion, where it is as if we see and think of failure as the learning, and we reframe it as, as you said earlier, just a challenge, a hurdle to get over, that will make us stronger. Well, then we won’t obviously feel the same sort of negative emotion around it, and we’ll be more resilient. So I think we start with

Patrick Adams  02:22

that. Yeah, that’s a that’s a great call out just defining the term in general. And to your point, you know, the in the I think many people, when they hear the word failure, they think about, like a negative like a negative feeling comes a negative emotion, like you said, and is should that be the case? I mean, obviously I think it’s human nature when we expect something to happen, or when we’re doing something and we expect a certain outcome, and it doesn’t work out the way that we thought it would. You know, there’s human the humanness in us, you know, automatically makes us feel like something bad, right? We’re mad, we’re upset. It didn’t work out the way we expected. But if we can, if we can change, you know, adjust that, or change that to okay, yes, the human side of us gives us this temporary feeling of, you know, a negative emotion. But if we can take that and almost go, Okay, now, now what? What’s next? Let’s reflect on this. What did we learn? What happened? Why did we not get the outcome that we expected? Was there anything that we could have done differently, or if we were going to do it again, what would we do differently the next time that might give us the, you know, the outcome that we did expect? So I think, yes, I agree with you that reframing or redefining that that understanding of what failure is is a great way to start, and it actually leads me into I went out and pulled some examples in preparation for this episode of other people out there that Many of us know, companies or people that we know that actually have done the same thing, where they’ve, they’ve put a spin on failure, and they’ve they attribute much of their success to the challenges, the opportunities, the failures that they experience. So let me just read through a couple of these, and then we can kind of talk about them a bit here. But the first one on the list is Thomas Edison and the light bulb. You know, Edison famously said, I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. And his relentless experimentation led, obviously, as we know, to the invention of the practical light bulb, which is a cornerstone of modern life. But it didn’t happen on his first try, right? He had an expected result or outcome that he was looking for, and it took him 10,000 you know, times in order to eventually get to the one that actually worked. I’ll do one more within the business list here, and then I have a few others, but James Dyson, the Dyson vacuum. Dyson created 5126 failed prototypes before finally developing the first bagless vacuum cleaner. And his perseverance in refining his product exemplifies the power of learning through trial and error. Pretty cool. So any thoughts on those? I mean, those are well known names, Thomas Edison, Sarah Blakely, James Dyson, thoughts on that? Catherine, yeah,

Catherine McDonald  06:05

I think they’re good examples. Thinking of James Dyson’s very expensive mistake that you know, sometimes mistakes are really big, they’re really expensive. And obviously, do you know what? They’re nearly easier to learn from because they’re so big, you go, I’m not going to let that happen again. But sometimes it’s like, I suppose Edison, it’s, it’s, it’s, he’s, he’s developing, and he’s iterating, and he’s probably, maybe it was expensive, maybe wasn’t, but his mistakes were probably, maybe smaller each time, or maybe less costly, but he was learning as he went, you know. And then Sarah Blakely is, is amazing. I actually follow her on LinkedIn. I think she’s amazing. She’s always so positive, and she’s obviously had huge struggles, and she now motivates other people, motivates other women to go for it, not give up, follow your dreams. And so it’s great to have these people giving us these lessons, because sometimes we need that to hear that from other people. Felt this way. It’s okay to feel this way.

Patrick Adams  06:59

Do you know, that’s right, 100% this is another one on the list. Here is Michael Jordan with missed shots. Jordan famously said, I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. I failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed. I mean, pretty awesome, right? So the first three were obviously, you know, product based businesses. This is one where someone said, you know, this is obviously, we all know Michael Jordan, but you know the shots, the lost games. I mean, so many failures to get to the point of where you are in your you know this for him, for example, in his sports career. But that’s a great example. We have Oprah Winfrey, who was fired from her job as a television reporter because she was deemed unfit for TV. I bet that that job probably looks back and is like, man, what were we thinking? SpaceX, rocket failures, multiple rocket explosions, early days, nearly bankrupting the company, but each failure was analyzed, addressed, leading to successful launches and its position in space exploration. So you know, and I can go on and on, there’s so many different examples that you know. All of us know these people, and I think you know obviously that it’s important for us to make the connection. But there’s many listeners, and including you and I, Catherine, that have also kind of fall into these same buckets of, you know, there’s lots of things that have happened in our lives, whether it’s personal or in our work lives, that we could kind of put up on that list as you know, quote, unquote, failures or challenges or, you know, whatever you want to call it, and, and I think that, you know, for all of us to be able to identify those and go, you know, instead of, instead of looking at as a negative, think about it like, Okay, what did we learn from that? And what did we change? Or What will we change going forward, in order for us to have a better outcome down the road. And you know, for me personally, I’ll just mention you know my son, for example. Many of you have heard me talk about him a lot, but he is a collegiate athlete. He’s he runs track for a local university here in town, and when he first started, he really struggled. He struggled bad because he his his height. He’s not as tall as most of the other hurdlers, and he’s a hurdler on the track team, and he really struggled and had a really difficult time. This was a huge challenge for him in high school, and it was through multiple iterative learning experiences over those, you know, times when, you know, and I felt bad for him, because there would be times where he would literally fall over hurdles, he would trip in the middle of a, of a, you know, a race, and he just struggled so bad. You. But he kept at it. And every race, he would come back and, you know, ask himself, and he watched the video, and what did I do wrong? And where should my feet have been? And, you know, and then he would make changes and adjustments as he went, even this year, he he told me that he was making an adjustment to and he now he’s a he’s a senior. He just qualified for Nationals this year. He he’s he’s crazy good, and it’s because of the reflection, the the iterative learning, the changes that he’s made along the way that have caused him to be where he’s at today. But again, if you asked him, he would tell you multiple failures along the way to get to where he’s at right now. So it’s pretty cool. And I got a few other examples. That’s obviously my son. I have some of my own personal examples as well, but Catherine, I’ll turn it over to you. Yeah,

Catherine McDonald  10:49

just just as you were talking there, and I was thinking about the other examples of people, famous people, successful people, that you shared. And I think we have to kind of just mention the passion and the purpose, I suppose, and the passion that that people have that drives them, that I do think that I guess, it’s really important to feel that sense of purpose and passion for something, and to have that kind of clear goal in your mind of what you want to achieve, or at least have some sort of vision and that that seems to drive people and increase people’s ability to get over whatever setbacks or failures, because the fact that your son there, he Yes, he did the right things, his behaviors were right, you know, in terms of iteration and reflection and all of that. But that was driven by a passion for the sport, you know, and feeling a good purpose behind it, you know, the fact that he wanted to do it and succeed in it, and that he could do it. So I do think that that’s important, that that that piece is there when we are trying to do something, that we feel that that behind it. Does that make sense? It

Patrick Adams  12:00

does definitely. I mean, anything that we do, we should be setting. We should we should learn good practices and goal setting, right? And part of that is being able to envision or set the result that you’re looking for. What is it that I want to get out of this? I don’t just start something like Thomas Edison didn’t just, didn’t just start messing around with stuff, hoping that there was going to be some positive result, right? He had a very specific outcome that he was hoping for, and that gave him direction, right? We think about true north from a from a lean perspective, what is the outcome that you’re shooting for? What is the ideal outcome? And then, you know, making sure that you are iterating towards that, or experimenting and learning towards that, and staying in direction, because we will fail. Things will happen that even things that are outside of our control, will happen. And if we don’t know what that end result is, or at least have an idea or a vision of what that might look like at the end, then we could easily get pushed off, off the track right, and head down the wrong path, potentially, and that’s going to cause us a lot more time than what maybe it would have otherwise, yeah,

Catherine McDonald  13:12

just won’t pay off. You know, like my example I was going to share, was on public speaking. So for years, years and years and years, I struggled with public speaking. I as a team leader. Obviously, I had to lead meetings. I had to have one to ones, and then I had to go beyond that, when I worked in policy and advocacy, and I had to do a little bit of screen work, and I had to stand up in front of boards, and I hated it, like I just and I couldn’t seem to get better, no matter what, and this was years and years and years, and I never, ever felt comfortable doing it. But something changed when I studied organizational behavior and lean I just got so passionate about the subject and about what I was talking about that I found when it came to speaking about it, I just I developed the ability to be able to get up in front of people, and I think it stemmed from that passion for my subject and the feeling of purpose behind all of that as well. So I do think there’s something in that when it comes to success and failures, that something has to drive you to want to get over the failure. That’s

Patrick Adams  14:24

so true. So So you, personally, you had this vision of being able to get up in front of a large group and deliver value to that group that they could use Tell, tell us, what did the first I mean, the first time that you stood in front of a group and spoke to them on a subject. I mean what? When you say you know that it was a failure or that it was a challenge. Give us a kind of a context of what, what did that look like?

Catherine McDonald  14:49

So what would happen was, I, I’m a I’m a prepare. I’m an organizer. I could be as organized as I’d like, but the minute I’d stand up, I would clap. It over. The words wouldn’t come out, right? I would go bright red, I would shake. I would have all the symptoms of somebody who was a terrible public speaker. And I would I would show it. People would feel it. And, you know, the same people feel the emotion much more than they hear your message. Well, that’s what was happening people, I think, just felt awful for me, so I went through that for years. Now. I did keep putting myself back in those positions because I didn’t stop doing it, and I that obviously did help. But I think when, when my back then the vision wasn’t to be able to speak publicly. I had no vision for that, but I know anything. I was just in a job. I was doing my job. My job was okay, but it, you know, it was just a job. So the public speaking part was just something I dreaded, which I had to do, which was part of my job. But then when I got into lean and I started my own business, and I worked, started working with different organizations, suddenly the public speaking had a purpose. The speaking in front of people. It was about knowing I had the ability to help. I I was using my skills and my strengths and and I had knowledge to share that I believed in. So I just took the focus off myself, because I was, you know, I guess, able to see past the fear and the failure. So I once, I will tell you, when I started out, I had to stand up in front of a very large room of people and talk about, and this was at the very start, and talk about Lean. So I started talking about 5s but I got the S’s all mixed up because I just was so nervous. So instead of saying, you know, sort set an order shine standard SS, that I mixed up two of the S’s. And at the end afterwards, the owner of the event, or the organizer of the event, went back to the company who I had just started working with, and actually said to them, I wouldn’t put that lady in front of an audience. I wouldn’t have that lady represent me. At the time, I was upset, and I cried and all of that, and I said, Oh my God, what a you know, didn’t like her very much and but it took me a while to realize, you know, that’s important feedback I need to this is something I need to work on. That was a failure for me, a huge failure, but I learned that this is a skill that I need to get better. I need to keep putting myself in those positions. And also I wasn’t afraid to know, because I had a real reason for wanting to develop it. Well, I think that’s it. I think feedback, introspection, passion, purpose. You work on all these things, and you keep doing that, and you keep iterating and working and reflecting, and it does it does work. So

Patrick Adams  17:40

you said Catherine, you said that you kept putting yourself in those situations, but I have to imagine that you you did something different. You didn’t just keep putting yourself in those positions hoping that maybe you’d get better. Which experience does tend to cause us to get better, right? But what are the specific things that you did in between each of the these speaking events that that helped you to become better as as you went on or more confident? Yeah,

Catherine McDonald  18:10

so did. I got a little bit of coaching on this as well, and I realized what I was focusing on, that was making my behaviors appear as failures and to other people. So I realized I was focused too much, focusing too much on myself. I wasn’t thinking about the audience. I wasn’t interacting with the audience. I wasn’t understanding that what they were showing up for, you know, I wasn’t thinking about them. So all of these little tips and the way I shaped then obviously I stopped, stopped talking as much, and I started asking questions, and I started involving people, and I turned public speaking into a little bit, I suppose, of an interaction which really helps, because it allowed me to just step back for a moment and just manage myself my emotions, which is what I needed to do. So I’m still not perfect, far from perfect, but I don’t dread it like I used to, but that those failures, and particularly that one I mentioned, drove me to to go. I’m not going to let that happen to me. You know, I can accept that and I can be that, but I don’t want to be I want to be something different. I want to stand up there and have someone say something different. Someone say something different about me and actually have an impact on those people beyond my emotion. So it helps. It helped, for sure, what about what about you? You mentioned, did you have kind of a, I can’t imagine you, Patrick, ever going through failures, but did you have anything that helped sort of reshape the way you did things? So

Patrick Adams  19:40

so many failures, Catherine, so many failures, both in my personal life and in in my profession, in my work life. I mean, we can we? We would need more than than 40 minutes if we were going to going to go through all those. But while you were talking, it actually made me think about a failure that I actually talk about in my book. Which, you know, again, similar to you like I was in a position as a production supervisor, and I was thinking about myself at the time. And I admit this, this is, you know, I was very young, very immature. You know, this was very early in my corporate career, but I was thinking about myself and about, you know, what I needed to do to get promoted, and you know, what were the higher executives looking for and and never did I involve my team in the decision making in the in those beginning days, I was I was like, I just, I thought I felt like I knew the answers, and I went out and just made the changes that I felt I needed to make. And normally when I did that, it was on a weekend or after everybody went home, so they would come in and everything would be changed, and they’d be like, you know what’s going on? And obviously you can imagine that that caused significant failure for the team, because the team got upset, they got frustrated. They knew that I was kind of in it for myself. And it’s even hard for me to talk about this story today, because I, you know, I feel so terrible about being in that leadership position, overseeing that team and that process and some of the decisions that I made. You know, I wish I could go back and do it differently, but, you know, going forward, thinking through that similar to you, you know, not involving my team was probably one of the biggest mistakes that that I made. You know, we missed, we missed so many deliveries after that. And it wasn’t that the team was intentionally doing it, but they were intentionally not giving 100% because they knew that they were struggling to work in the environment that I had created for them, right? And they were looking to get out of there. So looking back, I mean, number one, engaging the team from the beginning, just like you’re engaging the audience and you’re speaking, you know, engaging the team and getting them helping to figure out where our gaps and equipping them and empowering them to make decisions and be problem solvers. You know, that was something that I didn’t do there in the beginning. The other thing was, again, thinking about myself. I mean, that’s a that’s a huge miss. You know, when you’re a leader of a team, you have to have, you know, empathy and understand your people. And you know, I learned a lot of this in the Marine Corps as a leader of Marines, but for some reason, you know that that job, that first job, and as a production supervisor, I just didn’t, I didn’t make the connection at that point, but it was very quickly after that that I started to make those connections. And, you know, start understanding that I need to involve the team, that I needed to understand all of their needs, and, you know, have empathy and put myself in their shoes, and and, you know, start making decisions a little bit differently. So that was probably one of the larger mistakes in my work, you know, work, career, you know, failures that that I would say, I have a few more, probably

Catherine McDonald  23:08

a very common one, I would say, with your managers, I know I would have been similar as well. I think I don’t know if there’s any trick. Yeah, I always talk about training people in leadership skills earlier, giving everybody leadership skills and understanding what it means to lead. Now, I don’t see organizations or enough organizations doing that, but I still wonder, even if you gave people this information, Is it human nature to do what you just said and just kind of make those mistakes at the start, and do we have to make those mistakes sometimes to learn from I don’t think everybody makes them, but it is quite common to kind of have to make those kinds of mistakes. And I think the thing is to learn quickly from them, because if we learn quickly, we obviously harm less people, and it’s easier on ourselves. But I think we’re always going to make some kind of mistake like that, you know, and my one again, from being a team leader. So I was 2223 when I first became a manager, and I had only been, let’s say, working in the organization full time for a year, and then I became a manager, and I remember they used to give managers a day a week, and sometimes two days a week to do office work, you know. So this was, you know, I thought this was great. You got to step back. And this was in a care organization where it was very busy, very physical, very hands on, but as the leader, you got to step back and take your office days. But what I only realized years later was they were the perfect opportunities to be there with people, observing what was happening, not just stuck in your own work, you know, and working with patients, but actually observing what was happening in the organization, taking into account the processes, checking in with the staff team. But I didn’t do that as a young leader. I went and sat in an office and did office work. And looking back, I do wish I’d done it differently, but I honestly don’t know. I wish I’d called it quicker. Maybe, I think I learned from doing it, but I wish I’d called it quicker. Yeah,

Patrick Adams  25:09

yeah. I think there’s something that we haven’t mentioned that I think could have helped you and I in both of those, and it’s having a good coach. So you talked about leaders that are new to a leadership role, and probably everyone makes those mistakes. I would agree with that. And honestly, in many of the companies that I’ve worked with and continue to work with, many times, people get promoted into leadership positions because they’re really good at running a machine, or they’re really good at administrative work and the job that they’re currently in, whatever it might be, they really good at that, to do that, that that job that they’re doing. And so they get promoted into a leadership position, but they they have none of the soft skills or no experience in leading other people. And when you’re dealing with other people, things change considerably. You know, you might have been really good at running a piece of equipment, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be really good at leading people. And this is where I think again, if we, if we organizations, had intentionality around getting a coach with a new leader who’s moving into a role, you know, and needs to know, like those things, or be told, or you know, and then have be able to experience and do some practical application with what they’re being coached on, then come back to the coach and have some conversations, reflect, learn, adjust. I think that could, that could make some significant impacts in a positive way, if, if organizations could do that? Yeah,

Catherine McDonald  26:41

I agree. I totally agree. I know we spoke lately about a coaching approach, and I’ve always been a fan of and I’ve always been a fan of managers taking that approach with people, and I know there’s other approaches you need to take, but I just think the coaching part, it’s not optional in leadership. It’s a huge part of how you develop people, and that’s a massive part of a leader’s job is developing people, and I don’t feel we’re at the point where organizations are and manage mid level. Managers almost have the coaching skills to do that, and it’s, let’s say, no one’s fault. It’s just, I think there isn’t clarity on responsibilities around that, so managers themselves can’t be responsible for something if they don’t understand they need these skills. So how can you develop something you don’t know you need? And then the organization obviously needs to set up, as you said, the systems and the culture and the supports to train mid level managers to have the coaching skills to be able to coach their teams. I just think we’re, I feels like we’re a bit away from that. Do you think?

Patrick Adams  27:42

Yeah, I think it depends on the industry and the company for sure. I think for many companies, it seems like I hear a lot of like, we don’t have the resources for that, or, you know, whatever. But think about, think about the, the what happens when you have turnover, like, if a if you promote someone into a supervisor role, and they’ve, you know, fall on their face, and they’re struggling, and they’re being and it’s just not the right fit for them, or they, you know, are not given the right support. What if you lose them? Now you’re having to rehire, retrain, and think about what that takes out of the company, right? I mean, there’s stats around that, but having a coach that can come alongside that person to help them, to give them a path, to help them with some goals, to help them with reflection, what an important piece you know that could save you a ton of money in the long run as an as an organization, and help reduce some of that turnover. Also, you know, how many, how many team members are you going to lose that report to that supervisor who doesn’t know how to lead, you know how many of them are going to leave and then you have to rehire retrain. So I think there’s a lot of lost, maybe some, you know, some lost money there that maybe you’re not considering when you say we don’t have the resources to give this new leader a coach

Catherine McDonald  29:02

and another thing. And I see now some industries getting huge grants for Lean transformations, or transformations in general. And actually those companies are getting the money, you know, from governments and places to do these things, because I’m actively doing some work with companies who are getting funded and grants to do this work. So maybe there’s some, and I do think it is, obviously there’s an expense to it. Not every company can afford to do it, or is a little bit, I suppose the money end of it puts them off. So if there were, if there was a bigger picture thinking from the powers that, you know, exist in countries. Maybe that’s the way to look at it, is to try and influence from that level, because I think that’s probably going to be needed if we’re going to talk about this actually happening. But as you look, look, leadership is massive when it comes to failures and learning from failures, that person that you. Report to has a massive impact on you. If they are not, if they don’t see failures as learning and they judge and they blame and they don’t know how to have the this coaching approach or how to be curious, it’s going to have a massive impact on the people that they’re working with, on their confidence and on their I suppose, willingness to try again, willingness to take a risk and improve something. So it’s not like the leadership piece, as we always talk about. It’s just massive here, isn’t it?

Patrick Adams  30:32

It is, it is. It’s a huge piece. And I think that for those that are listening in that either work for an organization that you know, where they’re working for a leader like that, or they might be having some of those same and I’ll even, I’ll say even for myself and my team. You know, I’ve caught myself a few times where, you know, I get frustrated because I maybe the same mistake happens twice or three times, and I get frustrated, and I’m like, you know, how are we not catching this? Why are we continuing to have the same thing happen over and over again? You have to be careful, as a leader in how you how you respond in those in those situations. You have to be able to control your emotions. And yeah, of course you’re frustrated, of course you’re upset, but to allow those emotions to come out in how you respond in that situation, that’s that’s super important. If you’re trying to develop a culture where people are free to experiment and free to try things, you’re going to have failures. You’re going to have mistakes happening constantly. Obviously, we want to try to minimize those and there’s different ways that we can do that through, you know, some you know, maybe some more structured experimentation, or, you know, things like that. But again, as leaders, how we respond in those situations is so important, you know, again, rather than getting frustrated and you know, coming off with like, you know, how can we make that mistake again? What’s wrong with you guys? Right? Instead of doing that, taking a step back, allowing myself to relax, and coming back to the situation, maybe at a later point when my emotions aren’t as high, and then asking the team, you know, What? What? What exactly happened? What you know? What did we what did we miss here? Like, get an understanding of what happened, and then what did we learn from this? And how can we what are the systems that we can put in place to ensure that it doesn’t happen again? You know, that’s key, right? Yeah,

Catherine McDonald  32:31

definitely. 100% so I suppose you and I have both trained in lean, and we have a lot of this information to hand. Do you think that lean, lean thinking, lean practices, help with all of this in terms of dealing with failures? Do you think that that’s something that lean, good, lean leaders have have learned along the way?

Patrick Adams  32:54

I do, and I think that you know, a good, Lean leader also we, you know, we have a process for everything, right? So what’s our process for dealing with not just dealing with failures, but first of all, the first piece of this is to encourage experimentation, right? Which is going to increase, if you want to call it quote, unquote, failures. But if you have experimentation happening in your organization, you’ve created a learning culture, then your number of failures are going to increase, right? You’re, you’re encouraging people to try new things, which are not always going to going to result in a positive end, you know result so, so you have to know that first and foremost, and then, you know, like I said earlier, have a, have a controlled, you know, whether it’s controlled experiments, structured experiments, but have a way to manage those experiments so that you know you’re not, obviously, first and foremost, nobody gets hurt, but you’re also protecting yourself and your customers from, you know, quality issues or things like that. So, you know, maybe it’s controlled experiments. Maybe you’re first teaching that and encouraging some of that, and whatever that looks like in your organization, but then following, when you get into an experiment, following a structured process for that, you know, PDCA is a great way to think about experimentation, you know, the scientific method, but you know, so you know, first, you know, what, what do I want to happen? Right? You talked about that earlier, but what is my hypothesis? What do I want to happen at the end of this and and then, what’s my plan to get there? What’s my controlled experiment that I want to do to try to get to the result, and then actually carrying out the experiment afterwards, taking the time to reflect, to think about, to check yourself, to see what actually happened. Was I able to reduce or eliminate this problem or this issue, or whatever it is that I’m trying to do? And then, and then taking some sort of action, whether you’re updating standard work, retraining the team on the new way of doing things, or you’re. And, okay, this didn’t work out. It’s considered a failure. So what are we learning from this? Our action is to actually go back and try something different based on the learnings that we had. So this is a way that we would take a very simple, lean concept and apply it to how we experiment and promote, you know, failures. Yeah,

Catherine McDonald  35:21

definitely. I fully agree. I think a bit of structure to it, even at the start in the planning piece, which is a big part of lean, is not to get bogged down in the planning piece, but to have that plan, to actually understand your problem, you know, define the problem, and have a plan. But even that piece, at that point, you can set the expectation, you can say the words, I expect that this won’t go perfectly. And I think when you don’t work to a structure where you have that kind of start, and you have, you know, iterations, and you’re coming back to revisit things, if you don’t have that, it can all just get very much up in the air. People can start blaming or there’s nowhere platforms to come back, to reflect and lean, gives us those in a big way, which I think is one of the huge benefits is, is it gives you those spaces to listen to each other and and to say these things, like, it’s okay, let’s work it out, whatever you know, but I think that just doesn’t happen without structure. And the other thing, I think, which really helps in my work. So I obviously do a lot of Lean work, but I usually blend coaching with Lean. So if and see what you think of this. So the if we come and get up against, let’s say, a problem, or we have a plan and it’s not going well, we will follow PDCA plan, do check, act until the process or whatever we’re trying to do improves. If a person is feeling emotionally, feeling stress or frustration, or whatever it is around something that’s not going right, around a failure, I teach them a framework, F, T, L, A, can you guess what that stands

Patrick Adams  36:59

for? I could take some guesses, but

Catherine McDonald  37:01

I’ll just tell you. I’ll just please so the app, so it’s feel, think, learn, act, right? Ah, I like that. Okay, what you’re doing is you’re working on both the process side and the person, the emotion side of it. So what you’re trying to do is get a lot of the time people get stuck in the feeling, the emotion piece, and they they have to go through a process whereby they are able to work through the emotion, to get, you know, think logically about what’s happening. Get to the facts. Get through that, to the learning. And from the learning get to what’s my action? What am I going to do here, to, you know, improve this, or to pick myself back up, or whatever. So yeah, I would use the two of those together to really, I suppose, understand that there’s emotions behind all of this as well, and we have to develop people and their resilience in order to not just, you know, the process side. So I think that can really help.

Patrick Adams  37:58

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s great, and it’s good to take get like, you know, I mentioned this earlier, but the not reacting to emotions, your framework kind of helps you work through that a little bit, so that you’re not being too reactive on with the wrong emotions, but really taking the time to to think through, to understand, you know what, what reaction is, is appropriate, and things like that. So I think that’s really good. I also like that there’s a framework. There’s that structure, you know, I think I even think about, like, what if you even added some form of structure on how to reflect on failures? And if you actually promoted, like, promoted to your team. Here is what we do when we have a failure, because we want we will have failures, and we know that. So number one, we want to understand what went wrong. We want to, you know, so, you know, maybe that’s the first point of our structure. And then we ask ourselves, what could have done? What could we have done differently? And then number three, what did we learn? So I mean, those three questions right there can help you to kind of work through that and move towards a, you know, whatever your next step might be in in that

Catherine McDonald  39:11

imagine Patrick, if every organization was doing that at the end of a week, or at the end of a job or whatever way you work. Imagine they were just expecting people to come with their challenges or failures, and imagine we had these discussions every week or every month on this, and people shared them and learn from each other. These are, this is not complicated. It’s not complex. It’s simple, and it just requires, again, probably, leaders, to create these spaces for this to happen, and this is what will help people deal better with failures, because I do think there’s a lot of people struggling with failure so well,

Patrick Adams  39:47

not not just to deal with it Catherine, but also, if that’s happening, they’re also going to have more successes if people are continuously learning and adjusting and developing and trying things. Experimenting things. Yes, we are going to have more failures, and we need to be able to deal with that, work with that, but that also means that we’re going to have more successes, too. And so, you know, the more that if we have this army of problem solvers that’s continuously working on controlled experiments to make things better, right, ultimately things are going to get better. And, you know, imagine as as we’re imagining this, this organization that does this, imagine that they’re celebrating not not just the successes, but they’re also celebrating the attempts and the learning outcomes, right? Oh, what you learned that many things this week. Let’s celebrate that. You know, you attempted this many experiments this week. Let’s celebrate that right? And then to your point, giving them a platform or a way to share those lessons across the teams. You know, I know Paul acres for his company. He uses WhatsApp, and everyone in his company is on WhatsApp, and they’re constantly sharing pictures and videos with each other about things they’re experimenting with, two second improvements that they’re finding success in. And, you know, he’s on there along with his leadership team, celebrating that with them, whether it’s a, you know, quote, unquote failure or a success, they’re celebrating the learnings, and they’re celebrating the attempts. They’re celebrating all of that. And it’s pretty amazing.

Catherine McDonald  41:21

It is, yeah, again, back to kind of reframing this whole idea of, you know, failure, wow. Let’s talk about failures. Yeah, let’s, let’s make it a positive experience, not a, you know, getting stuck in the you know, emotion and blame it. But let’s, let’s go, wow. Okay, that was some failure. What did you learn from that? You must have learned so much from that, but to be able to change it, not that we’re encouraging people to do things wrong, but if it happens, we need to take that approach for it to get out there and for people to learn from it, you know. So it’s trying to get the right balance, isn’t it? It’s trying to obviously set ourselves up in organizations to do things right first time where possible, but accepting that that’s not going to happen. So the 10% or the 5% of the time it doesn’t, let’s take it. Let’s learn from it, let’s look for it. So this is a different approach. I think,

Patrick Adams  42:11

yeah, I agree completely. And I think, again, as I said earlier, we could probably continue on and on with multiple examples. I actually had a few more that I took notes on that we didn’t get to talk about. But as I think through that a little bit too, I think about all of the listeners that are out there, and you know, just, I guess, reiterating the fact that you know, failure is a necessary step on the path to success. And I would encourage everyone that’s listening in to think about your own favorite failures, you know, reflect on those. Take time to sit back and think about 2024 don’t just think about all the great things that you did, but think about the areas that were challenging to you, that the places that you would say, you know, maybe you failed in that particular whatever project or whatever it might be. And then, you know, I would even say, if you’re watching this episode on social media, maybe you’re watching it on LinkedIn or or on YouTube or wherever it might be, drop a comment below with one of your favorite failures and what you learn from it. We’d love to interact with you and discuss, you know, just those learnings. And I’m sure other people would love to hear that as well. I think that could be a great way for us in our kind of lean solutions community, to share and learn from each other as well. Catherine, any closing remarks on this topic of rethinking failure and really thinking about failure more as a teacher and not the enemy.

Catherine McDonald  43:46

I was just I was kind of laughing to myself, going, I obviously I need to make much bigger failures, you know, to get to the level of success that Sarah Blakely and James dies. I obviously I’m not making enough failure, so I need to go out and have more failures in order to get to the level that they’ve got to. I guess that’s that is the truth. You know, you have to take risks in order to get to where those people have gotten to. And sometimes we’re just not making enough efforts because we’re too afraid to fail. So the lesson for me is more more failures.

Patrick Adams  44:16

I love it. I love it. Let’s do it. Well, maybe we can chat about this one too, and upcoming episodes this year in 2025 we’re kind of we’re also reframing how we deliver our episodes. And part of that is going to be series where we’ll be, we’ll actually be talking about some of these topics over various episodes in different with different context, or guests, or things like that. So I’m sure that we’ll have some further discussion on this one. Like I said, I have a couple more that I notes that I took down on, you know, other failures that I’d love to talk about. So maybe we’ll circle back to these at at another episode, Catherine, it’s been great to have. Chat to see you and have this conversation again. I think we’re just scratching the surface here, but hopefully this sparks a little bit of thought with our listeners around you know, just kind of again. Re just rethinking, you know, how we address failure, and not just for us personally, but for our teams, for those of you that are leading teams, are you encouraging your team to experiment? Do you have a structured approach to to reflection, and do you have questions that you ask? Are you and also taking, you know, self inventory of how do you react when there is a failure? Are you quick to get upset and frustrated? Maybe you have to, you know, put together a different process for that. And maybe it’s a 10 second break, and then you have three questions that you ask anytime there’s a failure. Practice that, and I think it can, it can definitely help to again, just put a put a little bit of a better spin on the word failure, and the results of that will be, will be more success in your organization. So Catherine, again, thanks for for being on with me today, and I will see you in the next episode.

Catherine McDonald  46:18

Great to see you. Patrick, thanks. Bye.