How failure increases your team's performance / Stephan Wiedner / Episode #164

You need to fail... Yes, I said it. 

Because failure is the fastest way to success when you're innovating. But it's surprisingly hard to fail. And this is a major problem. Why, you ask?

Well, in our service design practice, failure is part of prototyping. You have an idea, you create something, you try it in the real world, learn from what happened, and based on that, improve your solution to repeat this process.

See what I did there? You try and learn, that's the key.

Trying something, you actually hope that it's going to work out differently than you planned so that you can learn. But when things don't work out as planned, this is often perceived as... failure. And failure isn't what most organizations embrace or celebrate. The truth is that they fail at, well yeah, failing.

There are many reasons for this, but maybe the biggest one is a lack of psychological safety. Here's the kicker... Scientific research has proven that the best-performing teams have the highest degree of psychological safety. So how do you grow the appetite for failure in a risk-averse organization that is focused on maintaining the status quo?

We explore that question in this week's episode with Stephan Wiedner. Stephan has done a lot of research on this topic and seen many examples of what works and what doesn't. So if you're interested in building a "fail-safe" environment in your organization, then you don't want to miss out on this conversation.

One thing that surprised me in this episode was that you can objectively measure the levels of psychological safety. Of course, this is a great tool to show you and your CEO if you're heading in the right direction.

Enjoy the conversation, and keep making a positive impact :)

- Marc

--- [ 1. GUIDE ] ---

00:00 Welcome to episode 164

05:30 Who is Stephan

08:30 lightning round

12:45 What is psychological safety

14:30 Why does it matter

15:15 Where is the lack coming from

21:30 The internal voices

23:30 A fail-safe environment

27:00 Strategy and tactics

31:30 Barriers to adoption

34:15 Awareness within organizations

38:00 Top-level management

42:30 What are you committed to

44:30 Measuring psychological safety

50:00 Myths and misconceptions

53:30 The results don't lie

56:45 What's next

58:30 Closing thoughts

--- [ 2. LINKS ] ---

https://www.linkedin.com/in/swiedner/
The Fearless Organization (book) - https://amzn.to/3hdAuZE
The Culture Code (book) - https://amzn.to/3h7RH6M
The Whisper on the Night Wind (book) - https://amzn.to/3iHa5UB
Psychological Safety assessment - https://zarango.com/freepsi/

--- [ 3. CIRCLE ] ---

Join our private community for in-house service design professionals.

https://servicedesignshow.com/circle