Stumbling at Centre Stage: trust, failure, and an expanded conception of accountability

(photo by @_finn)

This post is not about video games, but that is where we’re going to start: with an anecdote.
Regular readers will know that I enjoy horror games, so my finally getting down to playing Alan Wake was long overdue. It’s a game so affectionately trope-filled (“Have we mentioned that we love Stephen King?”) that from the first moment, you can tell that the creators nurture a great appreciation for the genre.

As I settled in to tackle the second section of the game, I was in the company of an individual who had already played through Alan Wake in its entirety. Now, I enjoy horror games partly for the titillation and partly for the zen-like patience I have for tackling frustrating (and terrifying) difficulties. But as I encountered my first real challenge in Alan Wake, something was different. As is par for the course in horror games, I found myself overwhelmed by enemies and burdened with an ever-increasing awareness of my character’s inevitable demise.

Feathered, Hitchcockian marauders assailed me from the sky. Shadowy, axe-wielding psychopaths charged out from the darkness. And I was cursing a blue streak.

With each successive attempt I grew more frustrated. There were clearly too many enemies for the amount of ammo I had been allocated! The game was not responding promptly to my controller inputs!

My Honourable Spectator helpfully suggested that if I hadn’t blown all my flares (one of several available weapons) so early on, I might stand a better chance of succeeding. “Well, that would have been helpful to know before I found myself in this situation!” I snapped at him, mashing buttons frantically.

And now, dear Reader, you might be wondering what happened to my alleged patience. Well, I wondered the exact same thing, and after giving it a little bit of thought, reached a startling conclusion.

I am comfortable with failing in the pursuit of success, but I am not happy with failing in front of an audience. I love the dogged, determined repetition that is necessary to finish most horror games – but I’m not used to having someone sit and watch as my character gets mauled, despite my efforts.

Needless to say I engaged in a humbling bit of self-reflection. But the matter is not as simple as the willingness to look bad in front of other people. It’s about fostering safe spaces and examining the language we employ pertaining to accountability.

License to Fail

In in a recent blog post, the inestimable Laura Wesley argues that “a successful life is one that is full of failures. Many failures means limits were pushed, lessons were learned (hopefully) and opportunities were taken.” And she goes on to discuss a matter I have seen surfacing a great deal lately, namely, giving oneself “permission to fail”.

Risk-aversion – whether on an individual or organizational level – has been a challenge in the public service for a very long time. On the Public Service of the Future blog, Colin Hoult talked about the ongoing challenges we face with risk aversion in the public service, and how there are few easy answers about how to go about assessing risk consistently and practically: “the Code [of Values and Ethics] is relatively silent on how risks should be taken. How should public servants assess if risk is appropriate? And if there is no framework for making that assessment, are we surprised that there aren’t people out there trying to push forth new ideas?”

But while I am pleased that folks like Laura have a solidly internal locus of control and respect the fact that she very self-effacingly claims that her “ego is getting in the way”, when it comes to fostering this so-called permission to fail on an individual level, I think that she strikes closer to the root of the problem in the following sentence: “I’m too afraid of being embarrassed or what people may say about me to really achieve A-N-Y-thing.”

This consciousness of the external gaze – this awareness of an audience – is what was at play when I was struggling with Alan Wake. And it is the same social reality that is at play every day of our lives. It’s the reason I rarely leave the house without throwing on a lick of mascara, and it’s the reason that when we slip on the sidewalk, many people are initially more concerned about who saw them fall than whether they hurt themselves.

This effect is amplified at work, where performance is tied to livelihood and reputation. And yet failure – though not critical to achieving success – is critical in elevating the level of success achieved and the potential heights that can be reached.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell describes a study concerning students learning the art of pottery, in which it was determined that students tasked with making a single, excellent pot over the course of their learning acquired skills much more slowly than students who were simply tasked with producing a pot each time they sat down at the wheel. To quote Penelope Trunk, “Greatness comes from lots of terribleness.”

In Poke the Box, Seth Godin argues that in order to “consistently ship innovations to the market “, a business must also cultivate “the ability and willingness to appear stupid in front of others”, and I certainly agree. I think that cultural change starts on the social level, in email threads and between cubicles, and that organizational risk management practices follow – indeed can only be implemented and modeled after – the flow of socio-cultural work conditions, which are in turn influenced by micro-interactions between individuals and within teams.

But the real question is how we can get to this place where – at least on an individual level – we can enjoy a qualified license to fail. The answer starts, naturally, with trust, and more specifically with accountability. First, let’s talk about trust.

The Secret Sauce

Being able to trust your colleagues is of the utmost importance when it comes not only to fostering this license to fail, but also just in everyday operations.

As Nick Charney lamented in his presentation at the Next Generation of Government Summit, people are more likely to cover their own butts and copy your bosses on an email tasking you with a project than they are to trust that you will do what you said you would. He calls trust the secret sauce, and we’re missing it. This is a big problem because if your colleagues can’t trust you, can you trust them?

It’s a vicious and self-perpetuating cycle.

But in marketing trust, we often risk overlooking the fact that sometimes trust is betrayed. Sometimes your colleagues let you down, and then what? When it comes to performance management, our behaviour often leans towards once-bitten-twice-shy dynamics.

Written partially in response to Nick’s statements, Colin has another great post about how to rebuild trust when it has been violated intentionally or (as is more commonly the case) unintentionally. He focuses on the essential but often challenging necessity of communicating openly with one another.

“Without those tough conversations, we end up hoping that situations will magically resolve. In our organizations, especially in government where we work largely in a knowledge economy where we need to share information and trust our colleagues more than ever, we need to make sure that not only do we start from a position of assuming trust, but that we also have the courage to address our professional relationships if that trust is broken.”

I think Colin and Nick are absolutely right, but I want to dig a little bit deeper and examine precisely how we can “start from a position of assuming trust”.

Expanding trust and accountability frameworks

If we are going to create safe spaces where we feel able to risk failure in order to elevate our levels of success, we need to work on creating spaces that are safe for those around us. And again, it comes down to micro-interactions between people, both in and outside the workplace.

In a comment on Colin’s blog, Thom Kearney remarked that “too often [we] see organizations that are dysfunctional because individuals don’t pay attention to the basics of inter-personal communications.”

Everyone is the protagonist of their own story. As such, for better or for worse we tend to privilege our own points of view. So when another person’s actions have an impact on our work, we are quick to centre the incident around the impact it had on us. But it is, quite simply, not that simple.

When rock climbing, the climber is kept safe through cooperation with their belayer (the person who manages your ropes and whose body weight will catch you if you fall). The belayer provides enough slack for the climber to move up the wall freely, while keeping the line taught enough to ensure support if the climber falls or releases their hold on the wall – often to take a break or assess the situation to determine a best approach.

Let’s say the climber jumps for a hand-hold and misses it, falling off the wall. The belayer is jerked upwards in their harness, balancing the fall of the climber according to the allocated slack. It’s a bit of an unpleasant sensation on both ends (falling and jerking upwards), especially if we don’t anticipate it. But as much as ongoing communication can facilitate this relationship, both partners know that they are connected to each other and through that connection are working to both reach the top and stay safe. If the climber falls, the belayer’s harness gets jerked because that is part of being a belayer, and falling is part of being a climber.

I think we need to reframe our work relationships this way. We are all climbers and we are all belayers. Sometimes a climber falls, and with a limited conception of accountability this can be seen as the climber’s responsibility alone. But that’s not true, really, in any workplace. We are interdependent, even when we work in isolation. Everyone climbs; everyone belays. We all rise and we all fall and we all catch someone. Next time someone messes up, view it as a jerk in your harness.

Don’t tell them they betrayed your trust. Tell them that you’d appreciate a heads up next time they are going to attempt an epic dyno – so you can be prepared to adjust your workflow accordingly. As a belayer, that is what you are trusted to do, and there is someone doing the same for you.

So it’s not just a matter of – as Colin discussed – rebuilding trust after it has been broken. It means expanding our notion of what constitutes accountability to include our own responses to difficult incidents. It means refocusing our narratives to regard such incidents not as a betrayal of trust, but as a natural diffusion of responsibility and a hiccup in the way we work together. And that means holding ourselves accountable for how we view challenges, and how we respond.

This is a tricky thing to do in some situations. We are predisposed to dole out blame relative to what we perceive as a person’s level of influence. It’s an adversarial model that we’ve been raised on and it will take work to shake it. You were more “popular” than me in school and so now I can call you snooty and make fun of you for making less money than me, right? I don’t have to think about your personal struggles or your perspective – if someone has more power than me, then they are more accountable, right?

Wrong. This system is about forgiveness and expanding trust – not about normalizing or making apologies for poor behavior, but about challenging people to step up their game. Dropping someone is not okay, but neither is it acceptable to go grumbling away without addressing the issue when you think you’ve been dropped. It’s about telling someone how you view them and why, about listening to their perspectives, and about expanding accountability to create safer spaces.

We’re all connected, climbers and belayers, and we are accountable as a network – one person laced to the next. Whether you have to manage up or manage down, we need to be mindful of our role.

This means, maybe, that we shouldn’t snark about our colleagues when we’re out for beer. This means that we shouldn’t just say, “Oh, that speaker was decent, I guess, but this one time she really let me down” – you need to talk to the person in question about why your harness was jerked (or why your belayer dropped you) and what we can do to prevent the same thing in the future.

It’s not as easy as playing the blame game. IT isn’t enabling me! My manager is too restrictive! We all do it. But if we are going to set up an environment where we can innovate, fail and succeed safely, we need to work on creating that secret sauce together – for each other, for ourselves, and for our organizations.