Nobody talked about what wasn’t working
It was one of my trickier facilitation moments.
I’m in a design session with people from two organisations. My brief was to facilitate a series of workshops to review their partnership.
A set of expectant faces looked at me with a collective plea to not name what I saw — that this partnership did not exist.
What they did have was:
A lengthy partnership agreement that had been through the legal wringer.
A governance flow chart.
Seven years of agendas for, and minutes from, meetings where delegates attended in place of the senior leaders.
A gallery of photos of an annual fundraising event where the ‘cash cow’ handed over a novelty cheque to the grateful charity partner.
It was a partnership in name only. I took a deep breath in the design meeting and called it.
© Jacinta Cubis
Two years later, this weak, donor recipient relationship had evolved into a partnership where more than money changed hands. The partners collaborated on joint concerns, such as the financial abuse of older people, dementia research and building the capability of financial professionals and help line volunteers.
The workshops didn’t do it alone — but they started the honest conversations that needed to happen.
If someone had called the small missteps and bigger mistakes each organisation had made over the previous seven years, they could have developed a mutually beneficial partnership a lot earlier. Just think of the time and effort saved, as well as the impact on the issues they cared about.
At the workshops, we heard that nobody ever talked about what wasn’t working. We heard about a lack of common purpose, unclear roles, mismatched expectations and one party doing most of the work for the annual fundraising event.
There were lots of ‘oh, it wasn’t just me thinking that?’ and ‘I’m not the only one who felt that’ and ‘oh, you too?’
Those conversations about their shared failure — uncomfortable, overdue — produced more clarity in a few workshops than their years of polite collaboration.
In her research, Amy Edmondson found that, ‘Creating an environment where people feel safe admitting to failures…takes strong leadership’.
I’d add that it also takes a bit of brazen honesty (‘look mum, the Emperor hasn’t got any clothes on!’), a thoughtful structure and compassionate facilitation.
It took a while, but as a result of these conversations, the partners moved from sensing their partnership was a failure to seeing the possibility of its huge potential.
Sharing experiences of failure helped them to reframe their partnership, not in terms of only money, but in terms of mutual issues.
Sharing reframes failure from ‘who did this?’ to ‘how, or what, can we develop from this experience?’
This blog is part of a series exploring how we respond to failure — from denial all the way through to learning. Last week’s video introduced the benefits that come from sharing our mistakes/stuff ups. Watch it [HERE].
Thanks for reading this far!