Heavy Strategy - 073 - Failure and Resilience

Ned @ 3:30 - “But when they say, I dropped out of college and look how well it worked out for me, there’s a lot of asterisks after that. So it’s important to bear in mind that failure itself is not a great thing. It’s the way in which you fail and what you learn from that failure that actually helps you succeed later.”

Greg @ 6:00 - Has an interesting point that it’s a mistake to treat failure casually - to let it become an abrogation of responsibility.

My note: I think this is a bit of pointing out “move fast and break things” has tradeoffs, and hand waving away the negatives is irresponsible. Also underscores an importance to understand the scope of your failure compared to a mistake.

Kyler in response - “Well, I like that idea. I think that mindset of no matter what I do, whether I succeed or fail, I have learned, which means this is a success, makes you very resilient”

My note: There’s no short pithy answer to underline that failure is not good - but you can definitely build from it.

Greg @ 11:00 - Interesting point on top of the family side - did working those extra hours take an opportunity away from someone else?

Joanna @ 14:50 - schedule messages on Slack and don’t feed an imbalance that contributes to a toxic environment.

Ned @ 20:45 summarizing Joanna’s story - “It’s what you do in after a failure that sort of defines how you look at it in retrospect. So you decided to make a decision to try to make it better as opposed to just kind of covering it up and not talking about it.”

Kyler @ 24:30 has a good story on how not owning up and the cover up is a million times worse than the initial issue.

28:00 - touches on intellectual safety - NTSB rules, 5 whys, rubber duck debugging, etc.

If it’s a systemic problem, putting it on an individual to fix it may not be the right answer. But there is no perfect process.

Joanna @ 36:30 - “at some point, you have to depend on people to do the right thing, regardless of what the process is, which means they need to internalize what the right thing is. And that’s much more complicated than it sounds. It’s something we actually do a lot of training on.

There’s a whole concept called mission command that has to do with, why are you doing what you’re doing? And whose mission is it? And whose mission is that in support of? And how do the missions join together?”

Heavy Strategy - HS073: Failure and Resilience

https://overcast.fm/+AAkr1bEotm8
https://packetpushers.net/podcasts/day-two-devops/heavy-strategy-failure-and-resilience/