{"id":28864,"date":"2022-11-28T18:05:26","date_gmt":"2022-11-28T17:05:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/?p=28864"},"modified":"2022-11-28T18:06:01","modified_gmt":"2022-11-28T17:06:01","slug":"failure-culture-and-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/failure-culture-and-the-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"Failure culture and the internet"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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I saw quite a number of posts and comments over the last days concerned with „failure culture“ or its absence in organizations. Mostly\u00a0an example was given, followed by admonishments to embrace failure as the fastest way forward.

One thing is clear. Any culture that does not allow and even demand a certain kind of failures or mistakes will likely neither be a great place to work in nor particularly successful in the long run.

Quite on purpose there is a restricting „certain kind of\u201c included in the last sentence. This is where things get messy.\u00a0

In particular when talking and thinking about law firms, which (like most professional service firms) tend to have a harder time coming to grips with the question what „failure culture“ or a similar concept might look like in their context.

A very plain and minimalistic scenario can help.
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A mistake was made within an organization.\u00a0
People reacted to it in a certain way.
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No matter what the actual details look like – it is important to be very clear that based on this set of inputs we cannot say anything worthwhile about what happened.

Not about the mistake.
Not about the reactions.\u00a0
Not about the organization and its culture.

Maybe the mistake is totally inconsequential. Sometimes even severe mistakes are made and everything works out fine.

Maybe the mistake has horrible consequences. The final launch of the space shuttle\u00a0Challenger\u00a0failed catastrophically and seven people died, all because of known problems with tiny O-rings in low temperatures (and it was cold on launch day).\u00a0

Maybe a person with a career-long track record of being reliable and conscientious has a terrible day and for just once makes a mistake.\u00a0

Maybe an individual has been counseled, coached, coaxed, helped, trained, admonished and advised multiple times over the last months regarding the need for attention to detail regarding this particular task\u2026and just doesn\u2019t care.

Each of these (and many other) „maybes“ will have decisive influence on any reasonable and practical view on the mistake made, the reactions that occurred and what all that might (or might not) say about the organization and its culture.

Details matter.
Nuance matters.
Even if much harder to display and digest on the internet.\u00a0

If we really want to move things forward, it might be worth investing some time to get things both right and relevant. Otherwise, even helpful thoughts will be much too easy to dismiss.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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I’d love to hear from you.\u00a0<\/p>

If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>

And if you know somebody else, who might also be interested, please share.<\/p>

All the best,
Malte<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw quite a number of posts and comments over the last days concerned with „failure culture“ or its absence in organizations. Mostly\u00a0an example was given, followed by admonishments to embrace failure as the fastest way forward. One thing is clear. Any culture that does not allow and even demand a certain kind of failures […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized-de"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}