Episode 35 – Team Life IV – Protecting the Team Through Failure

Failure is initially perceived as a bad word - especially for new agile teams, and especially in ‘vintage’ cultures. Fear of failure is well over half of the cause of the Resistance. Avoiding failure will cost your teams and business - because you will spend all of your precious time and money planning for perfection to avoid it. The secret is to flip your thinking on failure immediately, and this requires the skill of a coach to keep people from panicking, backsliding and even turning against one another.


* The biggest cultural block when starting agile is that fear of failure
* Mastery of Failure is a badass trait
* Most other people will need some practice and exposure to feel ok with failure
* As they learn, your job is to shield them from negative side effects
* You can’t stage failure - you have to go through some as a team (because the only way to know about failure in advance is to plan excessively for them)
* Once experienced, all that is needed is a) a commitment not to repeat it and b) an enthusiasm to look for the next one