Capt. Ben Berman - Airline Pilot and Aviation Safety Investigator - likes to remind his crews:

‍"I've never flown a perfect flight, and it's not going to happen today.”

‍From a very early age we learn that all failure is bad. It's time to unlearn this.

Great leaders - far from covering up their failings - invite colleagues to pay attention to them. In fact, certain kinds of failure can lead us all to happier, safer and more successful lives, just as long as we know how to learn from them.

In this month's Learning Lab, Dee Donnelly will lead us in an exploration of these different kinds of failure. In particular Dee will help us to identify, categorise and make use of failure. Inspired in part by Amy Edmondson's book Right Kind of Wrong: How the Best Teams use Failure to Succeed (Cornerstone 2024), there will be a healthy mix of insight, discussion and online engagement covering questions such as:

• What do we miss when we 'fail fast and break things' without pausing to learn?
• How might speaking-up challenge unhelpful hierarchies, creating environments that encourage intelligent failure?
• What can we learn about ourselves when we step away from blame, and other repeated patterns of thinking about failure?
• In what ways does our context make a difference to our appetite for failure?

One of our hopes is that you will come away from this Lab with practical ideas about responding better to failure. Another is that you will have increased confidence working with and around it.

‍"For me, losing a tennis match isn’t failure, it’s research."

- Billie Jean King

‍Our Facilitator:

‍‍Dee Donnelly delights in forming partnerships to support and challenge her clients to accomplish success. By creating a judgement-free space, Dee prompts insights and shares feedback alongside humour and energy. Dee encourages clients to explore both feelings and thinking, seeing her role as a trusted partner who has faith in the individual and the process. A veritable magpie, Dee loves to curate and disseminate articles, videos and seminars, spreading her enthusiasm and stimulating debate.