Improvise! by Max Dickins

Author:Max Dickins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

PRODUCTIVE FAILURE

What makes improvisation unique as an art form is that mistakes are – paradoxically – part of a successful show. Beyond the discoveries mistakes make possible, improvisers soon learn that the audience actively enjoy seeing mistakes made onstage. Audiences want to see the performers walking a tightrope. They want to see them wobble and recover. And sometimes they want to see performers fall off the tightrope entirely, just to know it’s dangerous. Without mistakes an improv show wouldn’t be the same. Because, just as when you have a BBQ you want to taste the burn on the food a little, in improv you want to taste the failure.

This is all very well, you might be thinking. But in the environments in which you live and work, mistakes don’t make the product better at all. It’s true that most mistakes don’t fall into the serendipitous or entertaining categories. A lot of mistakes are simply a pain in the arse: for example, embarrassing typos in an email, missing a meeting because you forgot to put it in your diary or snapping at a colleague when you’re tired. In the interests of clarity, it’s useful to have a taxonomy of failures here. Amy Edmondson, a professor in leadership and management at Harvard Business School, has produced exactly that. She outlines three different kinds of failure we might encounter in life: preventable failures, complex failures and intelligent failures.36

Snapping at colleagues, missing meetings and typos are all examples of preventable failures. They are easily avoidable with a little more care, and it’s hard to see if anything positive can come from them. If we were being generous, we might identify the small learning that may arise from each mistake (for example, double checking the copy of your next email before you send it). In lieu of much of a silver lining, you just apologise for preventable failures and try to do better next time. We all make these sorts of mistakes and so, with a bit of contrition, most reasonable people will forgive you and move on.

While we want to avoid preventable failures, complex and intelligent failures are much more useful. First, let’s see what Edmondson means by a complex failure. A complex failure occurs when, despite our best attempts, despite following best practice processes and protocols, things still go wrong. In short, in a very complex and volatile world, sometimes shit happens and there isn’t much we can do about it. This is because it is not possible to understand every aspect of a complex system and so outcomes are hard to predict. A good example of where complex failures might occur is in the aviation industry, as explored in depth by Matthew Syed in his book Black Box Thinking.37

Airlines follow endless procedures and checklists to ensure every flight goes smoothly, yet problems do occur. Still, airlines these days have incredible safety records. The accident rate hovers around 0.25 per 1 million flights. This is because of the focus the aviation industry has historically put on gathering and sharing data on mistakes and faults.

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