Wednesday December 21, 2005

Mistake Rituals.

Flush that mistake.

More thoughts from Tom Kelley's (IDEO) new book: The Ten Faces of Innovation.

I have read a couple more chapters that focus on the different roles that Kelley thinks are key to have in an organization to foster innovation. Given my sometimes more twisted perceptions, one amusing practice in the Experimenter chapter had me chuckling.

Kelley has a section where he talks about the role of failure: "Fail often, to succeed sooner." Rapid experimentation he calls it. But what do you do when an organization has gotten too beat up and fears failure?

He tells that story of Positive Coaching Alliance and the baseball team at Cal State which had, at that time, a losing streak going. The team created success rituals to change how the team thought about mistakes. They literally had a minature working toilet they used to flush mistakes away. It worked too; they went on to win championships.

I am going to try this one out on my four year old.

[evil laugh]

Oh, and Happy Holidays!! ( Dec 21 2005, 12:55:22 PM PST ) Permalink