Read time: 3.19 mins
Learning to Embrace Failure
Leaders must be willing to have their fundamental assumptions challenged if they are to move their business forward. Often it’s the toughest questions that produce the most productive and transformative results. Are you ready to analyze the way you do business?
Transcript
We have this worldview and mental map about how things work and don’t work, and the issue to be able to creatively find and solve challenges better and ask the better questions to do that, is really figuring out what parts of that map are just dead wrong.
California, at one point, was an island. Yes, indeed. If you go back to the 1500s, explorers were sent from Spain in search of an island that was full of riches. So they get to the Gulf of California, where you’ve got a peninsula of the earth coming down on this side. You’ve got Mexico here. The explorers have been sent from Spain to find an island full of riches – they’re at the end of a long journey, they’re going up that Gulf of California, and they see land on the left, land on the right, water ahead, water behind – for hundreds of miles.
They conclude California is an island. Then to confirm that it’s an island, they send other explorers to the top of the island of California. They get to where the river Mendocino comes into the Pacific Ocean. They conclude that must be the top of the Island. They put it on the map. They go back and tell the cartographers.
And then it’s confirmed: California is an island for sure. Then a few years later, they send more explorers. When they get to what they think is going to be the island, they discover it’s not. In fact, the ‘island’ of California is attached to the land of North America. They tell the cartographers and the king, and they get severely punished for trying to challenge the map.
In the 1500s, California was an island – even though literally 20 or 30 years later, there was strong evidence it wasn’t. The island persisted on the map for close to two centuries because the maps we carry meant power and control, and an unwillingness to give it up. The map was right. And any data suggesting otherwise was wrong.
What we have to do as leaders is not be like the royalty who wanted the ‘island’ of California to be an island. We have to be willing to have our deep, fundamental assumptions challenged about the way we do our work. It might be as individuals, it might be as a team, it might be as an organization. The toughest thing to do at work and in life is to challenge those fundamental assumptions, but the most productive questions on planet Earth are, in fact, the ones that do exactly that.