Rescuing success from failure
Surgeon Atul Gawande spoke about how when we focus on avoiding failure, we by association also avoid considering plans for rescue. This is because we don't want to believe that we are capable of failure nor have the need for rescue.
The reality is that things go wrong all the time. And Gawande says that when things go wrong, there are 3 ways in which we fail to rescue:
We have the wrong plan
We have an inadequate plan
We have no plan
We need to be willing to consider the possibility of failure to be willing to plan rescues.
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I think we already do that as conductors. We imagine what could go wrong artistically and we plan for those during our preparation process. And we are effective in its execution (most of the time) largely because we had thought about it beforehand.
But - I wonder if we ever think and talk about this collectively as a group, as an organization - all the people in it like musicians, librarians, stage crew, grant writers, and of course executive leadership, all together.
I wonder what would happen if we also brought in all these people into the conversation of rescue plans? Perhaps holding each of us partially responsible for executing the rescue plans? Perhaps simply clueing everybody in on the rescue plan and what we can expect to happen?
As conductors and leaders, we could use the feedback and collaboration in not only having any plan, but securing the right and adequate plans. No one person is smarter than all the people together.
What are the failures that we might experience as an organization? When something goes wrong, who's making the decisions on which rescue plan to put in place? Probably someone in an isolated position in the top of the hierarchy (or perhaps a small group of them).
How often do you think there was no plan? How often was the wrong plan employed?
Did the musicians at the bottom of the hierarchy ever have a say, able to contribute to, or are simply aware of these plans?
If we do actually attempt to generate rescue plans, we may be missing an opportunity here when we do so only among a select few - because we're afraid of admitting maybe that we might fail, or that our plans may leak before they're ready, or that they ultimately do not have the best interest of everyone in mind. So we end up excluding the majority of the organization in the conversation that leads to finding the best plan, which results in a lack of transparency that erodes trust in people.
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Two things I took away from Gawande's thoughts:
We need to start acting as if we will fail, so that we can start imagining rescue plans and have time to tweak them to find the right questions to ask. This can be applicable on so many levels--individually, artistically, interpersonally, and organizationally. The goal is to end up with not just any plan, but the right and adequate plans for the failure.
Everyone needs to be involved in coming up with the rescue plans, for the following reasons:
We need transparency in issues that concern the wellness and livelihood of all of our people - not just the ones at the to
We need to be open to the fact that someone other than the leaders "with the titles" may have the solutions we'd never think of -- all we need to do is ask them for their help.
We will need to iterate the rescue plans and the diverse feedback is crucial to improvement in every iteration.
Thinking about appropriate rescue plans increases our ability to execute them, and it may just turn the tables at the critical moments of crisis - as Gawande says, "to rescue success from failure."
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