Twenty years ago two kids met on the ice, they had instant chemistry, they had talent in heaps, they won medals, they won hearts, until they got to the 2014 Sochi Olympics. They won silver. An incredible result for most, but leaders demand more.The challenge they set themselves next was tremendous. Against injury, against a loss of trust, against conventional wisdom, they planned to and won gold!
What was the one thing that set them apart? They harnessed the power of ‘failure insight’
Read further to learn this great lesson in leadership from Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, Canadian Olympic Gold Winners.
What could go wrong? For those not familiar with the sport of figure skating, let me simplify, falling is bad! If you skate long enough, hard enough, and do the things Tessa and Scott do, falling is a high probability event.
Fall down seven times, get up eight: To tackle this risk head on, Tessa and Scott designed a unique training methodology. Each time their coach blew a whistle, Tessa and Scott were to fall and recover quickly, but smoothly. They also practiced for crowd noise, and sounds of fireworks going off mid-performance — in simple terms, they trained responses for virtually everything that could go wrong.
The power of ‘failure insight’ worked.
And, when Tessa and Scott won gold in 2018, they became the most decorated figure skaters in Olympic history. A great story of sporting achievement. But, can failure insight be successfully used in the complex world of business? Read on to learn more from the Netflix story.
Netflix’s Chaos Monkey: What’s the biggest risk Netflix faces? A failure of its network affecting millions of subscribers world-wide. To make matters worse, it is impossible to predict where or when such a failure may strike.
So how do you develop a response to unpredictable failure? Netflix’s Strategy: Fail Constantly.
Enter ‘Chaos Monkey’: a program Netflix created that attacks its own networks sometimes more than 1,000 times a week. In other words, Netflix proactively sabotages itself in order to discover points of failure. This challenged its engineers to develop systems capable of surviving network meltdown. And through this process, Netflix used the power of ‘failure insight’ to build more resilient systems.
Harnessing ‘failure insight’: We are often guilty of practicing for perfect situations. But, perfection rarely happens in the real world. When you incorporate the ‘response to failure’ in your plans you begin seeing failure as a means of improvement. Fear of failure loses its hold on you, and you gain the freedom to express yourself.
Remember, failure is part of the game, and business. Just as Tessa and Scott did, rehearsing falling down could mean you know how to get up stronger when it matters most.
So, the question is: are you harnessing the power of ‘failure insight’?
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Disclaimer:
Ram Srinivasan currently serves as an Innovation Strategist and Transformation Leader, authoring groundbreaking works including "The Conscious Machine" and the upcoming "The Exponential Human."
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