Episode 87 - Fear of Failure

Badass Agile

March 03, 2019

Fear of failure surfaces at every level of your organization
In individuals, teams, units, leadership
It is a perfectly natural human instinct. People don’t want to lose face, lose trust, or lose security in the form of their jobs, prospects, opportunity for growth, and pay
However, fear of failure creates several forms of waste and loss:
- Hesitation (doubt, uncertainty, procrastination)
- Resistance to change
- Stonewalling - resistance to team
- Overcompensating with process to gain certainty and safety (planning, consensus building, failsafes, estimation
- All of these result in very poor performance
The antidote is in the the culture you build
- Hesitation - train people (through Agile Games, for example) the value of quick decisioning, and give them safety nets when their rapid experiments fail
- Pull change, don’t push it
- Connect more authentically with people’s sense of purpose, values, and needs.
- Again, start with willing minds and projects that fit - lower risk, less need for documentation - and pull people to you with the results
- Demonstrate, visibly, the results of thinking and acting in this way, and find people who will reward it (hint, you don’t need execs to approve incentives)

Toronto, ON

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