Shevek Pring

A while ago I ran a team building session for a group on a fast track to management course, the day was the usual mix of activities designed to bring to the fore their ability to work as a team, express their opinions and learn their flaws. Everything was going swimmingly, until I ran an exercise based on a 3×3 grid; you have to rearrange yourselves so that you are standing on your corresponding number by moving up, down and side to side.
Now, this is a great exercise and I have run it many times, but this time I managed to arrange people so that they were not able to complete the challenge, it was simply not possible to get into the right situation without cheating.
The group persevered for over 40 minutes and worked astonishingly well together to try and achieve this impossible task, they worked collaboratively and effectively and without a dip in motivation despite the length of the exercise.
Needless to say I was both highly embarrassed and impressed, I had made a fundamental error in my delivery, and had compounded it by continuing with the task, and yet, through those mistakes that were entirely mine, I managed to create a team spirit that was exceptional.
Now when it came to the debrief, I was interested to hear what they had to say, I made the point that despite the failure to complete the task their efforts were fantastic. Their responses were some of the most thoughtful and insightful that I have had from a group, they took on board the importance of failure as a motivation for change and improvement, they talked eloquently about their learning journey through the process, what they learned about their own communication skills, how they best interacted with each other to overcome barriers and how they could implement this knowledge in their everyday lives. I was impressed, and it got me thinking about failure in a new way. I have always said that failure does not exist if you are reflective and take lessons from the defeat, but that was only part of the success I saw with this group. The lessons on failure and its impact for change were definitely taken on board, but it was the creation of a team dynamic through a shared adversity that I felt was the lasting lesson to take from this, not only for them, but for me also. The concept that failure can bring us closer than success can in the right environments was a fascinating concept I had hardly thought about.
Previously I had always worked on the principle that you build success and self-confidence off the back of smaller successes, but this changed my view, it made me appreciate the depth of reflection possible when a failure is taken on board and analysed effectively. It made me see the collectivity that failure can bring, the sense of a shared burden bringing a group closer together in an endeavour.
So I went away and researched shared experiences of failure or tragedy, and came across some extraordinary stories; people brought together as lifelong friends as the result of shared tragedy, people who met every year to recount the story of an aeroplane crash that they had survived, people who profoundly changed their lives as a result of some great misfortune or failure.
Through this research I began to question why failure is not more integral to our education, why are we brought up with a fear of failing? surely this simply limits the experiences we are open to in our lives and therefore reduces our learning? Failure has to be a fundamental part of our learning process, and until our education system praises the children who answer in class, regardless of how wrong that answer is, then the fear of failure and the lack of stature for an enquiring mind will be the by-products of our education, much to the detriment of our children and the future leaders of our planet.
Let our children fail, just teach them how to grow from those experiences to become more reflective and self-aware human beings.