Relentless optimism
There seems to have been a strange trend developing in some circles of management in the last couple of years - a relentless optimism that is almost depressing to observe. It's nothing new that the self-help-guru cross doublespeak dialect that passes for management language absorbs and spits out phrases without taking much notice of their intended meaning, but lately it's really getting on my nerves. Particularly the phrase "it's OK to fail".
Now of course it is OK to fail, in fact it's unavoidable if you actually do anything. The idea behind having a culture that's accepting of failure is that people won't try and cover them up, and as a result the organisation as a whole can learn from the experience. The first step in establishing a that kind of culture is to encourage people to be open about it. Unlike the current trend where a failure is re-spun almost as if it were intended as a lesson from the outset, it's important to actually acknowledge that something went wrong.
We learn from failure because it's painful. It is somewhat perverse that by spinning everything as a positive, the organisation is denied the opportunity to actually learn from the failure because the pain is never felt. I've talked to people who insist that there are no negatives - everything is just an opportunity for improvement. They don't seem to understand that by under-selling the downside, they are effectively undermining any real chance for improvement. Because by not acknowledging the scale of the problem the appropriate time and energy cannot be invested in solving it.
