Reprint: R1104B Many executives believe that all failure is bad (although it usually provides lessons) and that learning from it is pretty straightforward. The author, a professor at Harvard Business School, thinks both beliefs are misguided. In organizational life, she says, some failures are inevitable and some are even good. And successful learning from failure is not simple: It requires context-specific strategies. But first leaders must understand how the blame game gets in the way and work to create an organizational culture in which employees feel safe admitting or reporting on failure. Failures fall into three categories: preventable ones in predictable operations, which usually involve deviations from spec; unavoidable ones in complex systems, which may arise from unique combinations of needs, people, and problems; and intelligent ones at the frontier, where “good” failures occur quickly and on a small scale, providing the most valuable information. Strong leadership can build a learning culture—one in which failures large and small are consistently reported and deeply analyzed, and opportunities to experiment are proactively sought. Executives commonly and understandably worry that taking a sympathetic stance toward failure will create an “anything goes” work environment. They should instead recognize that failure is inevitable in today’s complex work organizations.
The wisdom of learning from failure is incontrovertible. Yet organizations that do it well are extraordinarily rare. This gap is not due to a lack of commitment to learning. Managers in the vast majority of enterprises that I have studied over the past 20 years—pharmaceutical, financial services, product design, telecommunications, and construction companies; hospitals; and NASA’s space shuttle program, among others—genuinely wanted to help their organizations learn from failures to improve future performance. In some cases they and their teams had devoted many hours to after-action reviews, postmortems, and the like. But time after time I saw that these painstaking efforts led to no real change. The reason: Those managers were thinking about failure the wrong way. A version of this article appeared in the April 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review.
The Importance of AttentionThe very first step to learning is paying attention. Whether in the classroom, reading a textbook, listening to a podcast, or practicing a skill for work, dedicating complete attention is absolutely critical. All of these activities entail learning. Remember: “paying” is an action. You are essentially giving your thoughts, energy, and time to what is happening in the moment. Think about when a friend, family member, or co-worker asks, “Are you paying attention to me?” Attention means focusing on what is being stated, discussed, or shown, using the senses to literally bring information into the brain. Being a busy college student, there are challenges to paying attention. Below are tips and strategies for increasing your awareness about attention, and your ability to pay better attention to help your brain do what it is designed to do: learn! If you're looking for more information on one specific strategy, click on the name below to jump to that portion of the page. We encourage you, however, to read all of the information below. Build MotivationSometimes one of the biggest challenges to attention is motivation. Here are some ways to make motivation work in your favor:
Be PresentTo “be present” means to physically be where the attention needs to happen (such as the classroom), along with being mentally “there”. In addition to avoiding the pitfall of multitasking, here are some tips for being present in order to maximize your attention:
Train Your BrainAttention is based in the brain, and you can “train your brain” to pay better attention. Some of what has already been described above helps with the brain training, such as creating learning environments without distractions and building in rewards. Remember, though, the brain treats every waking moment as an opportunity to learn, so what we do outside of formal learning environments can still impact the brain’s ability to pay full attention. Here are some ways to train your brain:
Engage with the MaterialOne of the best ways to keep your attention is to be an active learner. Many students were never taught how to be active in a learning situation. This leads to students believing the way to learn is to passively listen, or to just write down what is being said word for word. Here are three ways to be active in the moment, and to avoid the boredom response:
Honor Your Attention SpanSimply put, even the most motivated learner can only pay attention for a certain amount of time before getting fatigued. It’s important to figure out how long you can keep your full attention before you start getting tired and less efficient. Make sure to plan ahead so that there are enough shorter study times during the week to have enough academic time-on-task. Learning works best with spaced practice instead of cramming, which also is a more effective approach for paying attention. The next step involved in the learning process is to “work the information”, which is described in the Making Connections and Practice, Practice, Practice sections of this website. |