From Failure to Success: When We Celebrate Learning

Today, many organizations focus on having agile teams that achieve successful results. However, your organizational culture is not ready for experimentation and learning through failure.

In Management 3.0, we have a great Celebration Grid tool, which helps us enable celebration when learning is happening. This tool allows us to share a complete view of the result of our experiments and it is presented visually. This is achieved through the relationship of the behaviors presented in the experiment and the results of success or failure that these same behaviors generate.

This tool is divided into sections that allow us to graph what we should celebrate and what generates learning for us. This learning is based on team conversations and reflections based on these same conversations. This tool contains the following sections:

• Success through good practices (this is expected).
• Failure through good practices (it is incredible that it happened, but it can happen).
• Failure through good practices (it is incredible that it happened, but it can happen).
• Failure through bad practices (this is expected).
• Success through bad practices (it is incredible that it happened, but it can happen).
• Success through experiments (this generates a lot of learning for us).
• Failure through experiments (this generates a lot of learning for us).

The learning generated focuses on the results obtained either by success or failure. The celebration focuses on the learning gained by the team. In this context, the word FAIL does not mean FAIL, it means FIRST LEARNING ATTEMPT.

HOW DO I APPLY THIS TOOL?

In our organization, we have a new area that was created in the middle of COVID-19. The team works remotely. This area is dedicated to the development of innovation projects. The people who make up this new area come from the operations area (larger projects). This team is dedicated to validating hypotheses through MVP developments (minimum viable product) that can be a success or a failure. The probability of failure is high (50/50). In this context, reflect on how important it was to have a tool that allows us to generate learning in innovation projects, and that incorporates key elements to handle failure in a better way.

I asked to participate as a facilitator in the innovation team’s monthly retrospective to introduce them to the Celebration Grid tool. In this session, we did the following activities:

1. Check-In: we start by asking some questions: How can learning lead us to success? And why is failure important? The purpose of this activity was to raise awareness about the importance of learning and its impact on achieving goals.
2. Fundamentals: Then I explained the purpose of the Celebration Grid tool and the detail of each of its sections.
3. Individual development: Each team member accessed the shared board and began moving the sticky notes around each section of the Celebration Grid. In each sticky note, they recorded a single idea about what happened this month.
4. Small groups: We then form small groups to review the common elements of their own post-its in each section of the Celebration Grid. In a smaller space, some people identified other talking points and other learning elements.
5. Group Learning: We all met again in the main room and went back to review the Celebration Grid. Powerful conversations about what we learned as a team and as individuals were generated through two final questions: What did we do well? And what did we learn? These questions help us to summarize everything worked on the Celebration Grid and allowed us to conclude on the opportunities for improvement that we should work on for the next sprint.
6. Final: Each member of the team gave recognition cards (kudos) to each teammate for the effort of this sprint. We created a chat on Google called “Celebration in Innovation”. Every time there is something to celebrate in the team, the message would be written and everyone will express their joy with words or emojis.

WHAT DID I LEARN WHEN USING CELEBRATION GRID?

Finally, my biggest learnings in using the tool are:

• In a new team, it will be more of a challenge to be able to communicate their ideas transparently. Openness will depend a lot on the psychological security that has been cultivated in the team and in the organization.
• It is key that the organizational culture not only focuses on immediate results. Learning will generate more consistent results in the future.
• This tool helps us to generate conversations that allow the enablement of continuous improvement. Consider that it is not enough just to share our ideas. You should talk about what happened in the past to look at the future with different eyes.
• It is important that team members facilitate their own session using the tool. Definitely, this practice will generate a higher level of commitment and responsibility when sharing our ideas.
• We must be careful to only share our opinions. The context of each comment should be described to generate productive conversations.
• It is key that everyone shares their ideas and facts and builds an environment where everyone is heard. That is why the facilitation of the session is very important.

I encourage you to use this tool and put it into practice in your organization.

Thank you!

For more information: https://management30.com/practice/celebration-grids/

For remote teams, you can download the blank Celebration Grid template: https://management30.com/download/34524/