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

Service Design Show

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 ] ---

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