 time to begin. So my name is Elise Applin and I'm here to talk to you today about failure. Now your reward for listening to me for the next 40 minutes is that I'm gonna tell you this embarrassing story about myself. So when I was a bit younger I was a competitive distance runner. I ran a very specialized event called the 3000 meter steeple chase. So if you've ever seen a athletics track before it's seven and a half laps of an athletics track but on top of that every lap there are five hurdles about this high that you need to jump over. Now I was relatively competitive at a national level back home in my country Australia and one year I was in really good form. I was super super fit and I was running really fast and I had an important race coming up called the state championships or the provincial championships and I thought I'm probably gonna win this. I'm doing pretty well here. So I said to my parents you need to come and watch me run this race. I'm gonna win and I need some people to take photos of me when I get my gold medal so that I can upload them to social media. So my parents came along and it was a beautiful day. They're sitting in the stands. It's sunny, not windy, perfect conditions to run this race. So I was super confident and when the race started I went straight to the front. I was winning. Unfortunately though two women were right behind me and I realized that these two women had actually represented Australia at an international race and this is something that was beyond my skill or experience level well beyond what I was capable of. So for most people in a situation like this where you're running faster than people that you know to be better than you, you'd have a realization. Maybe I'm out of my depth. Maybe I should slow down. But my confidence was so high that I did the opposite. I thought wow I'm even better than I realized. So I just kept running really fast and I was doing very well until two laps to go. Boom. The pain of running faster than I'd ever run before suddenly hit me and I could no longer keep up that pace. So I went from running with a really strong stride like this to just shuffling along very slowly. Now the two women that I'd just been beating caught up to me and run past me. I was no longer winning. If it wasn't humiliating enough that they had now gone off into the distance and they were going to win the race, all of the people that had been behind me a long way back caught up to me and passed me. And suddenly I was shuffling very slowly around the athletic track in last place. And if that wasn't embarrassing enough, each lap I still had to jump over the five hurdles. Except I was now so tired that I couldn't jump over them. And I had to climb over them like a small child would climb over a fence. It looked about as graceful as this. So you're probably sitting there thinking why would you stand up in front of a room and talk about this story. It's quite embarrassing. The reason I'm going to talk about this today is that I'm actually here to talk about failure. And this story really sums up what it's like to fail. I apologize for the fact that these slides are slightly cut off. So failure is embarrassing. It's something that can be painful to do. But it's something that people do talk about kind of frequently. And so that's my question to you all. How many of you talk about failure in the workplace? Raise your hand if this is something that comes up. Yeah. Okay. So it's something that can be difficult, but it's something that we start to talk about a fair bit. And this isn't surprising because it's actually embedded in many of our practices. I quite like the fact that the entire way through the talk, these slides are going to fail to show you all of the information that are on them. But rest assured, I will be providing them at the end of the talk. So you'll be able to see them in their full glory. But back to the talk. So failure. It's something that has a central part in a lot of the practices that we undertake in mature software delivery teams. So if we think about Agile, Agile came about because we had these big software delivery projects that took years. And at the end of these projects, we often had a product that wasn't fit for purpose or might not even make it out into the market. And surely these products and projects would have gone over time and over budget. And so we sort of said, well, that's not good enough. How about we start doing iterative development methods that enable us to experience failure more frequently and faster? And this will help us to course correct so that in the long term, we won't be experiencing such large failure. And then we have more newer kind of processes like hypothesis-driven development, where when we're starting a new project or we're thinking about a new feature or a new initiative, we specify what success would look like for this project. And we say, we'll know if we've succeeded if we see this metric move. And if we don't see this metric move in the way we anticipated, then our initiative or our feature has failed to deliver the outcomes we're expecting. And for those of you in the room that are developers, automated tests, another way that we talk about failure, these tests tell us whether our code is functioning in the way we're expecting or whether it's failing to work the way we anticipated. And if we've got any designers or product people in the room, lean customer research is all about trying out designs and putting them in front of potential customers and seeing whether they're succeeding at being intuitive or whether they're failing to be easy to understand. So we have all of these practices where we talk about failure. But we also have terminology. So we talk about failing fast. Okay? This is a terminology that's quite common in mature agile teams. And it's so common that we've actually started iterating on the terminology itself. And we've moved towards failing often, failing better, failing forward. And ultimately, we talk about wanting to create environments that are safe to fail. So this concept is obviously important to us. We've thought about many practices and processes that enable us to do failure. And we've got a whole vocabulary, lots of words that we use to describe failure. And it makes you kind of wonder, is failure the goal? Is that what we're actually trying to achieve when we turn up at work every day? So if you think about that for a moment, how often do you turn up at work thinking, I really hope that today doesn't go well and that we don't quite get what we were hoping for. If you're like me, you're thinking, No, that never happens. I turn up to work every day hoping for success. And when you start to think more deeply about this word failure and what it actually means, I think it becomes even more apparent that we're not actually trying to fail. It's not what we're going after. So if you think about it, failure isn't setbacks. Okay, failure is not trying something, try hoping that you're going to reach a particular outcome and then realizing that you haven't quite had the success that you're expecting. It's not experimentation. Okay, failure is not being honest about not knowing what an outcome is going to be and saying, okay, we're going to try something because we think it might succeed. But there's the possibility that it won't quite work the way you're expecting. That's just a natural part of experimentation. So failure is actually the bit where we do experimentation, and we don't learn. So we say to ourselves, we're not sure what the outcome is going to be, but we're going to try something. And when we try that thing, and it fails, we just walk away. We just think, Oh, well, we gave it our best shot and it didn't quite work out. So let's, I guess, just give up. Let's abandon everything. Let's jump off the ship. That's what failure is. It's the bit where something doesn't go the way you expected. And you decide you've had enough, you're not going to try again. So when we pair it back to really examining what the word failure means, it becomes really, really apparent to me that failure is not the goal. It's not what we're actually after. But you then wonder, well, we spend all this time talking about failure, and we kind of idolize failure, and we say that it's really important. What exactly are we trying to talk about then? What is the conversation that we're actually trying to have? And I've thought long and hard about this. And I am confident that what we're trying to talk about is growth. Bless you. So what we're actually trying to say is we want the opportunity to take risks, to try new things, to experiment, and then to learn from that process, to incorporate that knowledge so that the next time we try, we have a better chance of success. So I'm going to suggest that we've always been talking about safe to fail, and we've been suggesting that this is what we want our workplaces to look like. But what we're actually trying to implement are workplaces where it's safe to grow, where you feel comfortable taking risks, being challenged, setting ambitious goals, and running experiments where you don't know what the outcome is going to be. This is what we want. So that begs the question then, how exactly do we go about making a safe to grow environment? So these are the questions that we're going to answer today. What does a safe to grow environment look like? What bits are we as an agile community already doing quite well? And then finally, the most important part. What are the things that we need to get better at? So we're going to go through these one by one. We'll start with the first question. And the most important thing to know about safe to grow environments is that it's not a concept specific to digital companies or software delivery. Safe to grow is actually a concept that is typical of any high performance environment. So it can be a sporting team, a high functioning orchestra or music group, or a really, really high performing team in your workplace. But what this means is that we don't just have to look at funky Silicon Valley startups or cool European companies to really ascertain what it means to be safe to grow. We can just look at any environment that's high performing. So after starting to analyze different teams that I had experience with from my own running teams, my high school dance team, and understanding what made these teams high performing, I honed in on a few really specific characteristics. The first one is not going to be surprising at all. So when we think about this, what do they look like? The first element of high performing safe to grow environments is that they have collective accountability and growth. What this means is that we hold teams to account for their performance. And if they don't meet expectations, we don't yell at them or get mad. We understand why they haven't met expectations, why they haven't achieved the level of performance that we're after. And we give them an opportunity to understand the situation and to adjust their performance so that they have a better chance of success in the future. So this shouldn't be that surprising to you because we do this in Agile. So at the end of our sprints or our iterations, we have retrospectives where the team comes together and says, how did we perform? Are there changes that we need to make to the way that we operate in order to better achieve our outcomes, our desired outcomes in the future? And then we come up with an action plan, opportunities for growth to improve. Similarly, in hypothesis driven development, the whole idea of setting a hypothesis and having a metric of success is so that when we've finished an initiative or we've implemented a feature, we can reflect as a group and say, did we get the outcome we wanted? Or do we need to make changes and try a new approach? Similarly, lean research is a way of us being held accountable for the designs and the ideas that we come up with to build innovative products. It's our chance to assess whether as a team we're on the right track or whether we need to adjust our performance. So if you're doing any of these practices, you can pat yourself on the back because you have got the first component of high-performing safe-to-grow environments covered. You're doing collective accountability and growth well. Good work. But before you get too self-congratulatory, it's important to realise that there are other elements of high-performing environments as well. And the other main element is that they have individual accountability and growth. So it's not just about talking to teams about how they're performing and giving them the opportunity to adjust their processes and practices and improve their collaboration. It's also about talking to the individuals within those teams and saying, look, your performance isn't quite up to the standard we need. Or maybe you're performing really, really well and so now we need you to step up and take on more responsibility for the team. These types of conversations with individuals are equally as important as the team-based conversations we have. And the truth is we're not particularly good at this bit. And that's why I'm here today. So I'm going to tell you another story and it's about a presentation I gave at the Agile Australia conference a number of years ago. I talked about the journey of the startup that I was working for at the time and we started out as a loose collection of individuals. We weren't particularly collaborative and over time we formed this really high-performing team and we released a new product into the market and started to generate revenue. So it was ultimately a success story but like all success stories there were some hurdles along the way. And one of those hurdles was my own management style. I was very command and control. I made all of the decisions and I told everybody basically how to go about implementing those decisions. And the ultimate effect of that was that everybody that I worked with resented me. They hated their jobs and they wanted to quit. Luckily for me they held me to account for my behavior and they told me what issues they were having with the way I was working and they gave me the opportunity to correct the way I was working and improve. And ultimately this helped lead to our success. So I told this story at Agile Australia and at the end of my talk all of these people gave me feedback not about the actual content of the talk or the the message I was trying to get across. All anybody wanted to talk to me about was why I stood up publicly and told a story of of failure or of not performing particularly well. It was really surprising to people and they wanted to know why I felt brave to do that. And I was very surprised because this part of the story was about a minute long in a 40 minute talk but it was the thing that resonated with people most. So I started to reflect on this and I thought what was the difference why did I feel comfortable and I realized it was the normal part of my workplace to talk about things that we weren't very good at and to talk about where we needed to improve but that it wasn't necessarily something that happened in every workplace even if they had really mature agile practices or they were really good at collaboration. So I started investigating this I thought why are people not comfortable talking to each other about what they need to improve and so I started talking to a lot of people in Melbourne the city that I'm from about why they weren't holding each other to account very much and the universal answer was well um it's awkward no one wanted to have the difficult conversation. People just said to me well look it's really uncomfortable and you know my mom always said to me don't say anything unless you can say something nice and so people said to me well look we just don't have the skills it's something that we've never really practiced before and other people said to me I'm a manager um but I've kind of moved up to this managerial role over time not because I have great communication skills but just I'm the developer that's been here the longest so I just got promoted into this path and no one's really ever taught me how to do it properly so just not good at it probably not going to do it and then I had other people say to me does it even matter like my team's pretty good we're pretty effective do I really have to worry about doing this individual accountability bit we've got the collective accountability and growth bit really really well covered I don't think I need to worry and so in talking to all of these people who sort of said to me it's too hard and I don't really want to do it I came up with one example that in particular resonated with everybody and this example is the example of the brilliant jerk this concept refers to anybody who's really good at the core skills of their job okay somebody who as a developer is really good at writing clean code that's easy to test and really easy to understand or a business analyst that can take a really complex problem and distill it down into a really simple clear problem statement that everybody in the team understands so these people are really really good at the core skills of their job and they help propel their team to success but they also undermine their team because the jerk part of their behavior is that they're terrible collaborators okay they might never turn up to work on time they might ignore going to team ceremonies they might just be outright rude to people or cut other people out of the conversation and so these people often get away with their behavior because we focus on the core skills of the role and we don't hold them to account for their broader behavior and so i'm in agreeance with read Hastings here who says do not tolerate brilliant jerks the cost of teamwork is too high so there are three things you can do when you're faced with brilliant jerk the first thing you can do is nothing you can choose to just not hold them to account at all for their behavior and you can let them go on undermining the success of the team okay that's an option but ultimately a destructive one where you're not going to get the best performance out of your team as a whole so there are two options you can then take when holding these people to account the first option is the ultimate option in terms of accountability and it's where you say to the brilliant jerk your behavior is not acceptable you're fired and you ultimately just exit them from your company so you've done the first part well you've held the individual account to account for their behavior but you've given them no opportunity for growth so the most desirable thing you can do here is to hold them to account by having a conversation with them and saying look your behavior is not up to our expectations these are the examples of when you've behaved poorly we see value in you as a human and in your role here and we want you to help improve your behavior so this is the reason unfortunately that everybody started to agree with me and say yeah actually it's very important that we hold these people to account and we should apply that practice to the rest of our team so most people agreed with this because sadly pretty much everyone I spoke to had encountered somebody with this type of behavior in the past so sharing this example got people on board and they were like okay Elise like I'm with you I I want to help all of the individuals in my team be the best that they can be so that collectively as a team our performance is maximized but like I said I don't have the skills for this how do I actually go about doing it and so I started to think about my own experience with high performing environments and how we actually achieved individual accountability and growth and so it got me thinking about the story I told you at the start and I'm going to admit to you I lied I didn't lie about the fact I came last I lied when I told you that it was a story about failure because it's actually a story about growth okay I faced a setback in coming last I didn't achieve the outcome that I wanted but three weeks later I was competing at the Australian national championships and in that race a more competitive more prestigious race I didn't come last I came fifth which was my best finish ever at a national championships and I ran a time that is still to this day the best time that I've ever run so it was an absolute success and so I thought about what were the things that I had to change in the three weeks between those two races that that made me better and how I went about improving and the first thing I thought about in that environment that helped me succeed and grow after that setback was that in the track and field world there's a focus on goals it's a very clear uh desire to achieve something in particular I wanted to win the state championship race and I wanted to run a particular time so I had clear goals and thankfully these goals were tied to very objective measures of success it's very easy to assess where you finished in a race and how fast you ran so I had a clear assessment of whether I'd succeeded in meeting the outcomes that I wanted to achieve in addition to this the track and field world has an understanding that you're never going to win every race so if we're talking about Usain Bolt the fastest man in the world the world record holder the Olympic champion all of these accolades he's still lost races in his career it's just a fact we understand that we're not going to succeed every time so these things all led to really transparent conversations when I finished my race and I came last my athletics coach didn't say to me oh good job you tried your best that was really good cool good good work he was like well you didn't do very well did you and he's like you made some really fundamental mistakes in in that race okay you let your ego get the better of you and you just thought you were going to win and you made some terrible choices and you should have realised that you were running too fast and you should have slowed down next race you need to pay more attention to how you're feeling and to the clock so that you know if you're running too fast and so it was this conversation that gave me the opportunity to learn from my setback and to come up with a plan that would enable me to more likely succeed in the future so this environment really embodies this idea of radical candour this is a concept put forward by Kim Scott and basically what she says is that as individuals our only opportunity for growth is if somebody challenges us directly if somebody holds us to account and has a clear conversation with us about how we're performing but that's not enough there's a cautionary part to this if you challenge somebody directly but they don't believe that you care about them personally you're going to come off as obnoxiously aggressive and when that happens people become defensive they don't take on board anything that you're saying and they basically close themselves off because they feel like they're protecting themselves from an attack so what we need to do is get ourselves in the radical candour quadrant where people feel open to hearing what you have to say and so I've come up with what I call the safe to grow framework which has three elements if you can do all three of these elements you're giving all of the individuals in your team or your workplace the opportunity to be held account and to grow from that so the first part which you can't read says safe environment so this is about making sure individuals feel both physically but more importantly mentally safe in the workplace the next is a framework for accountability this ensures that we have facts that we can use to assess somebody's performance this is where we make sure that we have a goal and a very objective measure of success this takes the emotion out of our conversations and enables us to really determine whether somebody is performing at our expectations and then finally when we've worked out whether somebody has reached or exceeded expectations or fallen short we need to have a conversation for growth with that person and this is where they have the real opportunity to take on board new information and to improve their performance so it might seem like a lot but we're going to go through it one by one so that when you leave you have some clear takeaways that you can take with you we're going to talk about safety okay so how do we create a safe environment the first thing that you need to do here is just care about the people that make up your workplaces and make up your teams okay you need to acknowledge that everybody that you work with or that works for you is an individual okay they're not a resource they're not just a billable unit they can't be interchanged with a robot they bring unique experiences unique skills to your team and your workplace and unique to value this they also though bring their own life challenges everybody has a life outside of the workplace or at least I hope you have lives outside of the workplace and these can interrupt the way that we we work okay maybe there's something at home that's causing us anxiety we need to acknowledge that everybody who comes to work has these sorts of experiences and that that doesn't diminish their ability to to work but it's just part of the process of having humans in your team so there's a few ways that you can care about your people and not your resources one is just to not use the terminology resources to refer to your people but another is just spending time getting to know the people that you work with go out for a coffee together or sit down and eat your lunch together and understand what things excite them what their goals are for life and just show that you genuinely appreciate this person for the human that they are and not just the hard skills that they bring to the workplace in order to create safety it's also important to be vulnerable this is really key if you're in a leadership position but it's something that everybody can embody being vulnerable is about talking about the setbacks that you've faced the skills that you're not quite good at or the time you tried something and you didn't get the outcome that you wanted being vulnerable is really really important because it creates a scene where people realize it's okay to make mistakes often we have this concept that if when people come to work they're being paid to do their job so because they're being paid they should just succeeded at 100% of the time which is just not possible because we're all human and we make mistakes and we face challenges in the workplace and in our lives so being vulnerable and talking about these mistakes reinforces to everybody that it's okay to take risks it's okay to set ambitious goals and it's okay that you won't always succeed first go okay this is a similar a similar request or a similar takeaway and that is to talk about everybody's skills really openly so in doing this it's quite simple you just get everybody to do a self-assessment of their skills or potentially simpler than that you get them to just publish the one skill that they want to improve on this year you do this throughout your entire organization so from your graduates all the way up to your senior executives and this sends a message to everybody within your organization that we're all on a path to growth no one has all of the answers or all of the skills we need there's always learning opportunities for everyone and again this reinforces the idea that it's okay to not be succeeding everything all of the time this says sometimes it's less safe to grow and this is a cautionary tale for anybody who's in a leadership position there are sometimes that you have projects that need to succeed you do not have the room to use the project as an experimental project or an educational growth opportunity for people you might have a tactical reason or the project has to do with something that needs to be highly secure in these situations acknowledge that it's not a safe project for people to grow and don't put somebody who's inexperienced on that project staff it with your most experienced people because this is the sort of project that if somebody doesn't succeed and they face a setback they might not recover from okay so be smart about the way you give people the opportunity to grow and learn so if you can get all of that in place you've created hopefully an environment where your people feel safe to come to work safe to be themselves safe to try new things and this is where you can start challenging them directly and the first thing you need to do in order to challenge people directly is to just assess how well they're performing and this is quite straightforward because a lot of people from a lot of industries have spent a lot of time coming up with goal-setting frameworks and that's all you really need you need a goal-setting framework so that you have a clear understanding between yourself and the individual that you're going to talk to about what success looks like so if you've heard of smart goals you know your specific measurable attainable goals that's a framework for accountability KPIs similarly they set out very clearly what success looks like for your role in a given period of time we can debate later if KPIs are good or not but they are an example of an accountability framework for behavioral things you may have a social contract which defines within your team what the expected behaviors are we expect everybody to be at work by stand-up time we expect everybody to participate in retrospectives we expect everybody to speak respectfully to each other these sorts of things give you a framework of accountability to assess behaviors and to have a conversation with somebody about whether or not they're behaving up to our standards these frameworks though and these these accessible frameworks are not valuable if you spend time writing them down agreeing on them and never actually revisit them the key part here is that you actually have to use them you actually have to go back see whether somebody has met their KPIs or their goals see whether somebody is performing the way we expect and use those in a conversation okay so set about your frameworks early and then revisit them periodically to assess whether performance is good enough once you've done all that you come to the last piece and this is where you give somebody the opportunity to actually grow and it is super super straightforward okay because all it really involves is having that awkward conversation it just involves saying you know what I don't feel very good at this I don't have a lot of practice in this but I care about the people in my team I want the best out of them individually and the best out of our team as a whole so I'm going to be brave and I'm going to talk to them about what they need to improve so it really is just simply learning how to give feedback this giving good feedback is a talk all on its own but this is what you really need to do when you can give good feedback it reinforces that feeling of safety that people have when you do it well they realize that you're having this conversation because you care and not because you want to attack so I'm not going to give you all the tips on how to give good feedback today because it is a big conversation but I will recommend the crucial conversations book it takes awkward conversations from being awkward and uncomfortable to conversations that you realize are just important or crucial it's also really good because it has tips within the book for what to do when you're challenging somebody directly and you're holding them to account and you realize that you've said something that does make them feel attacked it tells you how to rebuild the safety within that conversation so I highly recommend this for those of you that can't be bothered reading a book this is the cheats version of the book okay so feedback talk about your observation okay and in this use your framework of accountability this is an observation based on fact you know I've seen that you've performed in this way we set out in the goal setting framework that you were going to perform in this way there's a discrepancy this discrepancy makes me worry because I think it's holding back our team from achieving its absolute potential what I need to see from you is improving the number of unit tests you write I know you're not comfortable with TDD let's get you some training on it that is what a conversation a feedback conversation or a conversation for growth could look like simply state your observation referring to facts explain why it's important for the person to care about that and then tell them what you think the next steps should be so that's it three things create a safe environment put in place a framework for accountability and then use that to have a conversation with the person to enable their growth the obvious question is if you're not doing any of this where do you start and this the answer is start with the safety piece okay Google did research on all of their teams and found that those teams that are high performing have high psychological safety so people feel safe to be themselves to be challenged and to try out new things in the workplace this was the number one predictor of whether their teams would be high performing so this is what you need to do first it's also the hardest bit though because it cannot be faked it's not as simple as just spending five minutes with somebody and writing down goals building safety is about spending time actually getting to know people and genuinely caring about them so it's difficult but I encourage you to do it because if you don't do it you are going to come off as this obnoxiously aggressive person when you try to challenge somebody to actually and hold them to account you're just going to come off as a nasty person and the person is not actually going to grow from this okay so start with safety and then work on challenging people directly once you've got that in place so this is my happy dance because I got to the end of the talk and I didn't trip over any of the million cables that are on the floor here I hope this is also the happy dance that's going on in your brains as you think about what you can do when you go back to your workplaces next week or tomorrow and you think about how you can actually start building safety for your people and challenge them to be the best that they can be so my name is Elyse Applin it's been lovely talking to you if you want to get in touch you can email me here or find me on LinkedIn I'm more than happy to connect and I apologise for the fact that all of those slides were cut off thank you