{"id":518,"date":"2013-11-20T04:27:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-20T04:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beta.dminlgp.com\/?p=518"},"modified":"2014-08-13T21:07:04","modified_gmt":"2014-08-13T21:07:04","slug":"failure-is-an-option","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/failure-is-an-option\/","title":{"rendered":"Failure is an Option"},"content":{"rendered":"

Failure is not only an option it is imperative.\u00a0 Growing up as a young boy in central Pennsylvania I quickly fell in love with the sport of baseball.\u00a0 More specifically the Philadelphia Phillies.\u00a0 Every second I had the chance, my brother and I would be out in the yard throwing and hitting ball.\u00a0 Over the years our play moved from the back yard to a little league field.\u00a0 \u00a0After little league came teeners, high school ball and finally college.\u00a0 One of my favorite coaches in college was a guy by the name of Mike.\u00a0 In fact, he was my pitching coach.\u00a0 He use to always say, “You\u2019re going to make mistakes while pitching, have a short memory, learn from them and move on.”<\/strong>\u00a0 I use to laugh! One night in a fairly significant game I found myself on the mound.\u00a0 In preparation for the game, Mike had been telling me all week that our opponents star player could crush high fast balls and hanging curve balls.\u00a0 So, I took his advice.\u00a0 The first two times he came to bat I was super intentional about my pitches.\u00a0 Placement, position and speed was all taken into account.\u00a0 I struck him out both times.\u00a0 Now, the third time he came to the plate, I wasn\u2019t so intentional.\u00a0 Just before he stepped into the batter\u2019s box, Mike yelled from dugout, “Don\u2019t get sloppy.”<\/strong>\u00a0 I still remember hearing Mike, and thinking in my head, this guy can\u2019t touch anything I have to throw at him.\u00a0 Rather than mess around, I\u2019m just going to throw three fast balls past this guy and be done.\u00a0 As hard as I could throw, I released my fastball high in the zone.\u00a0 Let me just say, \u00a0I have never seen a ball hit so far in person.\u00a0 This homerun would have went out of Yellwstone!\u00a0<\/strong> It wasn\u2019t just a home run, my left fielder didn\u2019t even move.\u00a0 As the ball left the bat I turned, watched it clear the fence, the outfield stadium seats, the road on the other side of the stands, and finally land on a house roof on the other side of the road.\u00a0 It was close to 500ft.\u00a0 Mike yelled out, \u201cThe harder you throw, the farther they go!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n

This past week while reading Open Leadership by Charlene Li I was struck by the concept of Google\u2019s amazing failure machine.\u00a0 More specific to there motto: “Fail fast, fail smart.”\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0 Within this motto, failure is not only an option, it is essential for creative process to move forward.\u00a0 Without failure and subsequently what we learn from each respective failure we become cautious and stagnant.\u00a0 While reading the following four actions emerged as keys to becoming an \u201copen leader\u201d\u00a0 willing to foster an environment \u00a0of learning though failure.<\/p>\n

Key Actions<\/strong><\/p>\n

Acknowledge that failure happens\u2026\u00a0<\/strong> None of us are perfect.\u00a0 At some point we are all going to fail.\u00a0 Realizing this truth, being willing to laugh at yourself helps free others around you to acknowledge this as well.\u00a0 Often, pride keeps us from admitting our shortcomings\u00a0 and at times even taking risk.\u00a0 Sometimes we are gripped with the fear of failure, causing us to not take risk. Without risk, we become stuck.<\/p>\n

Encourage dialog to foster trust\u2026<\/strong>\u00a0 Communication is key to learning from mistakes.\u00a0 A healthy culture encouraging risk is free to talk about the wins as well as the losses.\u00a0 Open critique is not seen as threatening, but rather a tool for sharpening.\u00a0 It is here where community begins to sharpen ideas, concepts and true greatness can emerge from.<\/p>\n

Separate the person from the failure\u2026<\/strong>\u00a0 Failure by all is inevitable.\u00a0 Truly great creators fail many times over, learning from each mistake.\u00a0 Too often we equate failure with the person.\u00a0 In these cases we begin to stifle or shut down the creative process.\u00a0 Open leadership requires a healthy differentiation between the leader\/creator and their failures.\u00a0 Just because an idea failed, does mean the person is not valuable.<\/p>\n

Learn from your mistakes\u2026<\/strong> Well, Mike looked at me from the dugout, \u201cHe yelled, what did you learn?\u201d\u00a0 I knew exactly what he meant.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t have to tell me.\u00a0 Two innings later, I faced the gentlemen who placed my last pitch to him in orbit.\u00a0 This time, I went back to the plan, applying what I learned.\u00a0 Five pitches later, he struck out.<\/p>\n

Nine innings, many little mistakes, one big mistake, failure was an option if learned from, one big win!!!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Failure is not only an option it is imperative.\u00a0 Growing up as a young boy in central Pennsylvania I quickly fell in love with the sport of baseball.\u00a0 More specifically the Philadelphia Phillies.\u00a0 Every second I had the chance, my brother and I would be out in the yard throwing and hitting ball.\u00a0 Over the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,220],"class_list":["post-518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dminlgp","tag-li","cohort-lgp3"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1852,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions\/1852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}