In my last post I began to explore the notion of “failure” and how it’s handled within agile teams. Here’s is the final installment of that post. Hope you enjoy it…

But is failure embraced?

Continuing with my earlier coaching example, I remember not that long ago I was talking to a group of our Scrum Masters at my employer . If you don’t know about Scrum, the Scrum Master is the primary coach and guide and agile leadership voice within the agile scrum team. They’re also responsible for maintaining core agile values within the team and for the team’s overall performance. What I mean by that is—guiding the teams improved performance over time. Continually asking questions like: Is the team improving in their overall performance? Is their velocity improving? Is their work quality improving? Are their teamwork and collaboration improving? And, is their focus on delivered customer value improving?

So my point to the Scrum Masters was I felt we hadn’t failed in quite a while. I defined failure in this case as a sprint failure or a stop-the-line incident where a team basically ran into a challenge and needed to re-plan or re-align their sprint.

They all agreed with me that things had been going smoothly. And I received more than a few questioning stares as to why that was a problem. I tried to be careful in my reply, but my concern was that we might be playing it too safe. That we were becoming complacent in our agile practices and that we weren’t stretching ourselves enough. We weren’t taking chances or risks.

I explained that these traits are fundamental to the growth and advancement of agile teams. And the fact that we weren’t seeing failures indicated that we’ve leveled off in our growth and performance. I felt this was a problem…and I asked if they could drive more failures from the teams.

Can you imagine the remainder of this discussion?

Here I am, the Director of R&D at a successful company talking to my team of Scrum Masters and asking them to drive more failure—to influence their teams towards more risk-taking and inspire more stretch goals. The point I’m trying to make is that I truly embrace failure. That I’ve learned to view it as a critical success criterion and that its absence is a problem for me. I wonder how many organizations and leaders have the same view.

The notion of “Failing Forward”

One of my favorite authors is . He’s relatively well known as a leadership coach and he’s quite a prolific author—having written more than 50 books on various leadership topics. He’s got a strong Christian background to his life and writing, so if you’re not so inclined, don’t let that put you off. He’s truly mastered the art of leadership.

A few years ago he published a book entitled . In it he emphasizes failure as a truly transformative factor in our personal, professional, and team-based lives. However, he carefully frames failure with a leaning forward posture. That is, instead of viewing failure as a negative end-state and feeling sorry for ourselves, we should embrace it as a positive learning experience. That you should be “leaning forward” in your failure, leveraging the lessons learned towards improvement and trying new approaches.

I don’t think Maxwell is simply blowing positive smoke in our direction here. History is clearly littered with examples of successes that were inspired, forged, and hardened in the fire of failure; Thomas Edison being a famous example as he persevered to invent the light bulb.

In my agile coaching I consistently use the terminology “fail forward” when I discuss team-based failures. Yes, I want a team to be honest with themselves and acknowledge they failed. But I also want them to embrace their mistakes instead of getting defensive, blaming others or denying it entirely. And I want their posture to be leaning forward, eager to try something new that will drive different results—certainly never, ever being afraid of failure.

I find that using this terminology helps teams to ‘get’ the nature of failure and to behave appropriately. Beyond terminology, however, project and functional leadership need to fully support the idea too—meaning the entire leadership team needs to be supportive of failure. There…I said it. They need to create, foster, and support a culture that embraces failures…as well as success.

Wrapping up—But, I’m a bit strange…

All of that being said, I wonder if I’ve got a strange and largely minority view towards failure. I wonder if the right response is to indeed be fearful of it; to deny its existence; to spend countless hours trying to predict it; and to never mention it in public.

Are those and similar actions the right responses? Anyway, I hope I’ve at least made you think about success vs. failure and perhaps inspired you to occasionally fail. Now I wonder if this blog series was a failure

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.