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- 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)