Personal Agile Development - Failures, mistakes
and experiencing are great levers to success.
When I have autonomy I grow. Yes, and mainly
when I have room for trying and making mistakes.
"The only way to not fail is to not
try" or "you learn from mistakes" - these are sentences I
believe many of us hear over and over since our childhood. Cliché? I think not.
The room for trying and making mistakes is one
of the things I believe in the most. After all, we all make mistakes all the
time. The question is do we learn from our mistake?. Truly learn. And the more
important question is do we know how to make mistakes in order to learn?
No. Don't avoid making mistakes. Really don't.
I even recommend feeling free to make mistakes. Don't stop trying even if it
means making mistakes. The idea is to know how.
My boy for instance, he's a champion in
computer games. The kind that has levels, adventures, where the main player
gains power and knowledge... And he didn't start playing from the highest level
becoming a champ without making mistakes, right?! He kept failing, fixing,
repeating, experiencing again, getting better, failing again.. and in the end
he feels on top of the world. Why? Because it's OK to fail and fix. Because he
has the space, the legitimacy and autonomy to fail. His feeling of success
comes from his ability to fix and make progress. There's nothing like small
failures and small successes as part of an experience to make us feel capable
and successful.
Same goes with me. My ability to grow will be
possible through the experiences I go through. But not just any experience,
it's my ability to fail, to fix, try again and get better...
I don't have to get scared and shy away every
time I make a mistake. I do have to be brave, take a good look at my mistake
and improve on it.
So how to succeed in making mistakes?
1. Don't be afraid to try. How
do people become master sportsmen? How does someone become a master at any
field? By trying. A lot. Trying that comes from the ability to learn and get
better.
2. By making small steps, our mistakes
will also be smaller, more digestible and easier to fix. They will also
increase our sense of autonomy to make mistakes. Just like in a computer game. Small mistakes are more controllable,
they teach us more. They are also less scary, less noisy and are surely less
harmful.
3. Inspecting our experiences and our
mistakes is another important part of knowing how to make mistakes. After all, we wouldn't want to make the same mistake twice, would
we?! Our mistakes are vital for our continuous improvement. They are great
learning tools, because they provide us with a perfect context to our actual
reality and not to what our reality should theoretically be. This is why
looking at our mistakes and asking what have we learned from them, what we
should stop doing and what we should start doing differently is a good and
brave way to learn. I think cooking can be a good example for this. Is a recipe
perfect the first time we try it? Or do we need to retry and refine it several
times until I understand what are the right ingredients for my palette, until I
find the "right mix" for me?
4. Sometimes we'll make small,
controlled experiments, so we can test how reality responds to the change we want
to make. But this will be a small experiment, so if we fail we can learn,
fix and try to make it better. Small mistakes that entail some preliminary
probing of the reality we have coming, are both controllable and help us learn.
5. Also from big mistakes - which regrettably
do happen - we ought to learn. We won't rule ourselves out for our past
mistakes. It is important for us to look back at the past, take with us what
helped us get passed the hard times and learn what not to repeat.
6. By making mistakes we learn how to
avoid some of them in the future.
And... Don't forget to enjoy the journey.
