Tag: feedback loops

Categories
Leaning to Action Positive Outliers Self-Awareness

Learning from Failure

Photo by Dương Trần Quốc on Unsplash

I had an experience this summer from which I didn’t emerge very well. Or did I? You be the judge.

I was shopping for summer shoes. So I found a pair I liked in an M&S outlet. So I took these shoes to a stool to try them on. The right shoe did fit me quite well. “This looks promising,” I thought.

Then I tried to put on the left shoe. I struggled. I struggled some more. Putting this shoe on was proving to be harder than I had expected. 

The sort of narrative that was running through my head went something like this: “Maybe this pair isn’t for me. Maybe my left foot is slightly larger than the other; it happens. But why haven’t I been aware of it before? Maybe I should abandon buying this style of shoe.”

Then it occurred to me to check the soles for the shoe sizes.

Yep! Sure enough, I’d picked up a size smaller for the left shoe.

Embarrassing!

I could have berated myself for being stupid, or a useless shopper. Instead, I decided to do something slightly different: I checked my heuristic.

A heuristic, from the Greek to find or discover, is an approach to problem-solving. The problem I was trying to solve was whether a new pair of shoes would fit my feet. However, it wasn’t getting me anywhere until I first checked I had a pair of the same size. My shoe-shopping heuristic missed a step – pardon the pun! 

This incident illustrates how we can learn from instances where our current heuristic fails. We reflect, and we change or augment our learning process. However, we often don’t. 

Check Your Heuristic

Project management is an attempt to systematise, to make repeatable, steps in a project. The problem comes when a project manager moves to a different context; their heuristic often seems to fail them. So when it comes to developing new skills to a higher level, failure is an asset. A skilled project manager becomes so because they experience a widely different set of contexts and levels of complexity. Book learning can fail them, but that is not necessarily the book’s fault. 

So we need learning environments where we are always consciously honing our skills, where we can value failing in a positive way.

What failures have been useful to you? Leave your observations below in the comments.

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Categories
Self-Awareness

Course Corrections – Part 2

For a period of time, a friend of mine prevailed on me to take up golf. To begin with, it seemed like I was doing random gardening on a long walk. I became very conscious of my muscle movements in a swing, which club to choose, and experimenting with little rituals, like the number of times I looked up at the target spot I was aiming for. I also became aware of two things that could undermine my performance as the game progressed: my inner emotional state after a ridiculously bad shot, and my physical stamina – or lack of it.

For me, golf was like random gardening on a long walk.

I realised that the inner game of golf was all about self-awareness. What I became acutely focused on was being aware of my muscle movements, grip and so on. If I made a bad shot, I would attempt to adjust and see if I got a better result. I was constantly correcting myself.

In yesterday’s post, we looked at the Apollo 11 mission and how the accuracy of the launch targeting was a delusion; the reality was that they landed within the lunar landing zone by a process of constant correction – a sort of feedback loop.

Then I moved to talk about a more personal kind of feedback loop, the Daily Heads-Up technique that I use for my personal organisation.

At least every week, I review, hone and improve my workflows.
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Feedback loops can operate at different cycles, such as at:

  • the weekly cycle. I ask myself the questions: What could I do differently this week to get better results than last week? What must I complete this week? What results to I want? I have noticed that these questions at the weekly level help me to work on my workflows. I’m continually reassessing and honing, for example, how I compose and publish articles like this one.
  • the monthly cycle. At this level, there is some overlap with the project cycle. It deals with somewhat more seasonal challenges. We are in the run-up to Christmas now, so my questions are centred a lot around being ready for the family visits, gifts, etc.
  • the annual cycle. I’ve just been through this, reviewing where I want to be by the end of 2017. This has really been an adjustment from positively saying ‘no’ to certain kinds of work, and positively saying ‘yes’ to replenishing events such as vacations, and positively moving towards the kind of work more aligned with my passions and chosen destiny. This is a less obvious, but profound level of course correction.
  • the project cycle. I’m coming to the end of a book publishing project. It’s not quite complete: you can’t find my book on Amazon yet (but you can find it here!!) And I’m about to start an online Leading Yourself programme very soon. Of course, there should be course corrections within the project cycle. Agile is very good at this, the traditional waterfall approach, less so.

In each case, the feedback loop provides the opportunity for us to correct our course, to learn, and to get better results.

In the next post, I’ll look at how neglecting the course corrections, the feedback loop can hinder our effectiveness and growth, and why it is so easy to neglect this.

Categories
Leaning to Action Self-Awareness

Course Corrections

I’m old enough to remember the first moon landing.

Everyone seemed to be in awe of this tremendous achievement. It was one of those moments when there was this feeling that the world had changed. Forever.

The distance between the Earth and the Moon is about half a million miles. The landing module landed within 10 feet of the edge of the landing zone. We were astonished that technology could be that accurate.

It wasn’t.

What we didn’t know was that throughout the flight, there was a course correction every five minutes. It appears that the trajectory of Apollo 11 was more like the tracking of a sailboat tacking against the wind than a dead-eye straight line to the moon. It seems that the Apollo mission was thrown up there, roughly towards the moon. If it hadn’t been these course corrections, the mission and the three men on board would have been lost in deep space.

There was a routine feedback loop. It was essential to the success of the mission.

We all have feedback loops we can use. I have discovered that one of the most powerful for me is what I call the Daily Heads Up a daily routine I write about in my new book, Leading Yourself. In the Daily Heads Up I do two things:

  • Review how I have done  over the last day; and
  • Plan the most important work for the next.

This is a circadian (daily) loop. There are other loops I use over different cycles. For example, I’ve just been reviewing 2016 and considering a 2017 plan.

I’ll talk about some of these over the next few days.

Here’s my question: What feedback loops are you aware of using? What feedback loops are you aware of not using?