Richard Sheridan (Cofounder and CEO, Menlo Innovations) wrote Joy Inc to share insight into practices that worked for his Org. Here he urges leaders to embrace change, create a “being safe” culture and make mistakes faster.
Fear is one of the biggest killer of joy.
Freedom from fear requires feeling safe. If you feel safe, you run experiments. You stop asking permission. You avoid long, mind-numbing meetings. You create a new kind of culture in which you accept that mistakes are inevitable. You learn that small, fast mistakes are preferable to the big, slow, deadly mistakes you are making today. But most Orgs give lip service to “fail fast.” In a “being safe” culture, people choose to run safe experiments that they know will succeed, effectively exhausting the energy behind a change initiative. This kind of practice is deadly to innovation.
It’s the opposite of a feeling safe culture. To establish a feeling safe culture, you must first come to grips with the fact that you are asking the people on your team to be vulnerable in ways that society has systematically drummed out of us since youth — earn good grades, get into good college, find a good job, get a promotion, earn more. Somewhere, you may have failed. Now we are asking you to go fail faster!
Make Mistakes Faster
Many Orgs take a “burn the boats” approach to change. They try huge experiments that are given no room for failure. This can work really well if you are absolutely right about your decision, and it can be disastrous if you are not. In order to try anything really new, you should start small. Small gives you space to run cheap experiments that barely register if they don’t work out.
“Run an experiment” — at Menlo, we are apt to say that at least once a day.
Avoid Deadly Paralysis of Sunk Cost Thinking
This is one of the most insidious obstacles to change in business today. This lets Orgs make really big mistakes very slowly. They attempt to avoid bad news by pretending it does not exist. It is human nature to avoid big bad news. There is fear just in the idea of change.
The Cost of Artificial Fear
What does it look like? A row of executive eyebrows. Bad news stopping with a certain executive because next level makes it clear failure is not an option.
For a make mistakes faster culture to thrive, you must remove manufactured fear as a management tool. Think of a HVAC system. Pump fear out of the room, filter out ambiguity, adjust the cultural temperature to the setting that makes the team comfortable, and them pump safety back in. The team then starts to feel safe.
If team members feel safe, then they will begin to trust one another. If they trust one another, they will begin to collaborate and we see teamwork. When mistakes are made, the team owns up to the mistake because there is no fear of reprisal or penalty. No time or human energy is wasted nabbing a culprit.
Fear comes with a high cost. Body releases adrenaline and cortisol. Blood is channeled to muscles and away from the learning centres of the brain. The fearful brain operates purely out of the amygdala, the reptile brain. Fight or flight are our only options. We’ve closed off our access to creativity and innovation. We’ve closed off the opportunity for change.
Just say “Lets try this and see what happens!” If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, change it or do less. We’d rather fail fast than not test.
Incrementally Change a Current Process and Give It Time
A big part of the joy in running small experiments is that you don’t have to make a final decision on anything right away. This is different from ambiguity, when people on the team are never sure whether a decision has been made and, if so, what the decision is.
To truly run an experiment, you need to try something out more than once because at first — no matter what you try — it will probably be bumpy.
Closing Thoughts
If you are the leader, your team watches you. Do you actually mean what you say? The team will continuously look for clues and inconsistencies in your message and your actions. If they find those inconsistencies, you’ll soon witness a rise in fear. It doesn’t take much fear to wipe out that feel safe culture.
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