Failing Better

24/01/2025 - Failing Better

Dr Brendan Clarke, Digital Learning Lead, NHS Education for Scotland and the KIND Network.

I’m lucky enough to spend my working days looking after a large social learning community for people who work with knowledge, information, and data across the health and social care sector. As well as the events, training, and other planned activities that we run, there’s a fair amount of informal chat on our Teams channel. As we’ve grown, that discussion space has become one of the most valuable things that we do, particularly when it comes to thinking about our successes.

Earlier this year, we were fortunate enough to have an #IAmRemarkable workshop provided to the network by Jo Haddrick, from the NHS Scotland Academy. These workshops, first developed to support and empower the technical workforce at Google, aims to support people celebrating their achievements in the workplace.

That workshop was very influential, particularly as many of us found sharing our own successes very difficult. I think that’s something to do with the kind of attitudes about professionalism that are common in this knowledge, information, and data workforce, where we often value detail, precision, and careful modesty above all else. Not only the psychology of reticence, but also professional norms prevent people from effectively owning their achievements, and selling them to others. That makes it even harder to take the bold step of putting something in a nutshell – and then taking credit for it. This is sometimes referred to as Imposter Syndrome or your Inner Critic.

So we do a supporting activity: our win of the week, where we submit our wins individually and collectively, and then join in a weekly celebration of our wins of the week. This positive and de-threatening activity has done so much to help us share and celebrate our successes – personal and professional – over the past few months.

But there’s a condiment to the success: the power of failure, gently reconsidered in a positive way. Personally, I find individual difficulties and frustrations highly motivating and effective in driving change. I could here pretend that I’d picked up the Latin tag “Fallor ergo sum” (I err, therefore I am) from St Augustine – but instead I’ve borrowed it from a 2010 book called Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. This book starts with a really simple question: why are we so bad – intellectually, socially, legally – at dealing with error, but then follows the threads of an answer to several unexpected destinations including criminal justice, health, and optical illusions.

I’m not alone in valuing some kind of reflection on the power of failure to make change. At the same time though, personal rumination on errors and mistakes can be extremely de-motivating. I’ve been reflecting on how to get more out of failures. In a past professional life, I worked with early career researchers who were often discouraged by the long and distinguished CVs of their high-flying senior colleagues. So I started to think about how those senior people had managed to achieve all they had achieved. I wondered about all the things that they weren’t mentioning in this litany of victories.

Think about the anti-CV: a document that sets out the things that we failed to achieve. That’s the negative space in a career – all the things that should have happened but didn’t. Admitting and examining this professional dark matter is fantastic for thinking about how careers happen. We recognise, in the abstract, that failures are a part of work and life for everyone, to some extent. But it’s another thing to be confronted by a failure CV that’s many times larger than my real-CV. That makes the daunting CV of a senior person much less daunting. Instead of being lot of achievements in a straight line, there’s a counterbalance in the roads not taken. Life isn’t lived in a straight line, but is instead rich in accidents, mis-steps, digressions, and experiments that didn’t work out.

Even though we rightly want to encourage people to celebrate their successes, finding some time for a positive bit of reflection about where things went wrong is useful. Useful in helping you steer clear of similar problems in the future, useful in helping you decide what you really want to do, and useful in making you feel better about trumpeting your successes. To borrow another quote, failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.

I’ll close with a minor admission of failure: regrettably, I don’t know where the anti-CV idea came from originally. That’s a lesson to keep better notes, I suppose, and to remind us that ideas often have a life greater than that of the author. We’ll go on, making mistakes, trying again, and paying attention to how things might have gone differently.


Reflective Challenge: Have you recently failed to achieve a professional goal? Spend a few minutes reflecting on what you’ve learned from that failure, how that failure might encourage you to change or grow, and reflect on how you might describe the positives of that failure to a colleague.

We’d like to thank Brendan for writing this guest blog which is part of the Leading to Change ‘Leading with Confidence’ series of Friday emails. You can sign up to these in the footer of this page and we invite you to find out more about the KIND learning network.

Dr Brendan Clarke

Role:
Digital Learning Lead, NHS Education for Scotland

Brendan Clarke runs the KIND learning network, a social learning space for people working with knowledge, information, and data across health, social care, and housing in Scotland.Brendan Clarke runs the KIND learning network, a social learning space for people working with knowledge, information, and data across health, social care, and housing in Scotland.

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