Shame and vulnerability researcher, Dr Brené Brown centres Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘The Man in the Arena’ quote in her 2012 book Daring Greatly.
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again,
because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
– Theodore Roosevelt (Paris, 1910)
Her point, and the President’s, is that to create change, to innovate, we are forced to act, to risk failure, to make ourselves vulnerable. We need to leave the group, stand alone, risking ridicule and failure whether it’s as an individual or an organisation.
When Dr Brown asked entrepreneur Kevin Surace about the most significant barrier to creativity and innovation, he named fear of ridicule and fear of failure.
We all know it takes courage to make ourselves vulnerable. Raising your hand to ask a question, whether it’s in school, a meeting, or a conference, we worry that we’re the only person who doesn’t understand. The truth is usually that we’re the only one with the courage to ask.
In life and in work there’s a huge amount of pressure to be successful. That pressure encourages us to play it safe, to stay with the group. But if we don’t risk failure, we can’t innovate and we can’t improve and this leads to stagnation.
Sometimes we need to get in the arena and get dirty. Whether it ends in success or failure at least we’ll learn something.
One way to encourage daring is to create a culture where it’s safe to ask questions, safe to fail. A simple and brilliant way to do this is to solicit improvement ideas every day. They won’t all be earth shattering but creating a forum for questions and ideas helps encourage people to dare to innovate and dare to fail.
I ought to know, as the newest member of the team I have lots of questions and even occasionally an idea. No one has ever said, ‘we’ve already tried that’ or worse ‘don’t you think we already thought of that?’ They have graciously listened to my ideas even when they’ve all been down that road before and know it ends in dirt and failure. We all do this because we trust that every now and again there will be some gold in that dust.
Samuel West from Sweden embraced this concept so emphatically that he created the Museum of Failure. It’s a good-natured collection of disastrous products and it reminds us that for every Apple iPhone there’s a Ford Edsel. Even the biggest organisations get it wrong sometimes on the path to getting it right, so go on and dare to innovate.
You can see some of his collection on YouTube.
For more about creating the right conditions for transformational change in your team, see John Hogg’s blog The Core Ingredients for Transformational Change: Culture, Empowerment and Leadership
To find out more about how CI can help you and your team, please get in touch. Colleagues within the University can also see our upcoming training events.
