The fringe benefits of spilt milk
It’s easy to fall into the trap of perfection. However, having perfection as a baseline expectation makes it nearly impossible for us and the people around us to take risks that are essential for growth and innovation. How do we embrace both excellence and experimentation?
It was just before 5 am on a weekday morning. Our baby had woken his older brother and me. We were slowly trying to function at what felt like an inhumane hour.
To encourage greater responsibility, my wife and I decided to have our son prepare his own cereal. He walked in, carefully balancing his bowl, with what seemed like almost no cereal, but milk filled to the brim. He messed … a lot. ’Why do you pour it so full!’ I growled. Frustrated and sleep deprived I went to get a cloth.
When I came back, those little shoulders hung almost on the ground. ’This is the worst day of my life,’ he said. Quite an assertion for so early in the morning! ’I feel like I can’t do anything right.’ Ah man, my heart. I could feel what he felt, and I knew I was largely to blame.
There I was, trying to impart a sense of responsibility – and instead expecting perfection from the start. Crushing perfection. I had the startling realisation that although I claim to subscribe to learning through failure, in truth, I was deeply uncomfortable with the messiness that comes with it.
At the time I was working with a telco client to help bring their new leadership framework to life. One of the new mindsets that time and again struck a chord was to view failure as an opportunity for learning and growth. It seemed to resonate deeply (and somewhat unexpectedly) with senior leaders. They reflected on how their experiences (both at work and in life) shaped their relationship with mistakes and failure. And how that impacted not only their own ability to take smart risks and recover when things went pear-shaped but also how they responded to the failures of others – often inadvertently creating an unproductive climate around them.
When we ran an impact survey three to six months later, 10 out of 11 country CEOs called out significant shifts in this mindset as one of the most positive impacts of the programme. According to them, this was likely to super-charge a culture of ownership and innovation.
The idea of taking risks, embracing failure and learning for the sake of innovation and growth stood in stark contrast to my own mindset for much of my life. As audit trainees we would start new audits by asking ‘What could go wrong?’ And rightly so! It’s an important question when your goal is to identify and mitigate risks. But what if this question becomes the primary driver for how we live our lives? How might that influence our overall mindset, decisions, and relationships? Would we allow our five-year-old kids to pour their own milk? And fail? And fail again? Embracing the messiness till they finally master it?
An important question to add to ‘what could go wrong’ is ‘what needs to be true … for this to go right’. May we recognise the moments that require us to lean into risk awareness and mitigation, as well as the moments that require bold risk-taking, embracing the possibility of failure in pursuit of the innovation and adventure that await at work, and in life.
Let’s not cry over spilt milk. Let’s mop it up and try a fresh approach – and have a little grace with those around us too.