Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm -- Winston Churchill
The conventional wisdom is that lawyers are risk adverse. As Mark Rigotti, the CEO of Herbert Smith Freehills, recently articulated to Lawyers Weekly: “We are trained from the moment we go to law school to squeeze risk out and to follow precedent, but an innovative culture is about taking risk and not following precedent.”
As law firms grapple with being innovative and how to best create an innovative culture, there is an aspect that doesn’t seem to get much air time: failure.
It isn’t quite as attractive as talking about innovation; yet innovation and failure go hand-in-hand.
If innovation can be described as doing things differently with impact (a neat definition from Scott Anthony, Managing Partner at Innosight) then an inevitable result is that sometimes doing things differently doesn’t work, or it simply doesn’t have impact. It’s this failure and how it is dealt with that can ultimately determine success.
So when things go awry, however that may be described – losing a big client, not meeting budget, not getting internal referrals – how do you leverage that failure?
The key is to develop a growth mindset, described by Psychology Professor Carol Dweck, as a belief that through hard work and dedication we can develop our basic abilities. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for leveraging failure along the pathway to accomplishment. Failure has to be seen as a learning opportunity.
Here are three steps to help leverage failure:
1. Take the time to reflect
When things don’t go to plan, we should stop and think about it. The danger is that we get caught up in the daily bustle and don’t take time to reflect. Failure isn’t something we are always adept at dealing with, and the tendency can be to ignore it or to rationalise it away.
Here it can be useful to consider the work done by Daniel Kahneman. In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman uses a two-system description to help us think about how the brain works. System 1 is the automatic system, which doesn’t require a lot of thought but does everything on autopilot, think of those things which you don’t need much thought to do: dressing, brushing your teeth, driving. Whereas system 2 requires more thought and effort, it’s the system we use to do mathematical formulas in our heads, or be analytical.
System 1 tends to guide system 2, in that if system 1 doesn’t throw up any red flags system 2 will be quite content to let system 1 handle it. This is where cognitive biases can get in the way. System 1 relies more on intuition and habit.
So back to when things go wrong. If we don’t take stock, take the time to reflect we can allow system 1 to take over, possibly simply relying on intuition or emotions, or our previous responses. However, taking the time to be more thoughtful can engage system 2 and result in a better outcome, where we consider our response, examining what went wrong with a deeper analysis.
Some questions to ask:
What went wrong? Why?
How much control did I have?
What could I have done differently?
Who else could have helped?
2. Collaborate
In the end we can only see things how we see them, no matter how hard we try to be objective. One of the easiest ways to get a different perspective on a situation is to seek outside input. This means building meaningful relationships that enable us to be open and trusting.
This can be collaborating with colleagues, or seeking external input from a mentor or coach – a large part of the work I do is helping clients find a fresh perspective.
Collaboration is a bit of a buzzword in law firms at the moment, but cut down to essentials it’s about building mutually beneficial relationships, and looking for ways to add value. And when it comes to your colleagues you can’t simply reach out if you don’t have a pre-existing relationship.
The danger is that we can only start seeking external input when it is to our advantage. A good example is if you hit a lean patch of new work coming in. Maybe you’ve had a few big matters that have come to an end and all your time and effort has been taken up by actually doing the work, business development has been consigned to the back burner. All of a sudden you are leaning on colleagues and hitting up your network for work. It’s too late: relationships based on trust take time and effort.
To collaborate in a way that is mutually beneficial means building the relationship over time, looking for opportunities to be of value, and engaging with colleagues more broadly.
3. Do something different
So you’ve reflected on what went wrong, sought external input and now it’s time to do something different. The definition of insanity, as the old adage has it, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Time to take the learnings and try a different approach.
It’s important to remember that doing something different doesn’t necessarily mean something amazingly innovative, or particularly new – just new to you. Moving forward, learning and growing are key and that’s an individual thing.
The more we try new things, the better we get at dealing with the inevitable failings, learn from them and improve. Seeing failure in this light can help overcome any risk aversion that might be getting in the way of being more innovative.