Ayelet Fishbach:
Interesting thing is that it’s often not about the negative feedback itself, okay? It’s often something about you as a manager or as an employee. It’s something about your history.

Joel Miller:
That’s Ayelet Fishbach. She’s a psychologist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and the past president of the Society for the Science of Motivation.

Ayelet Fishbach:
It’s something about the situation in which you get this feedback that leads you to either conclude that, “There is nothing I can do,” or “I need to work harder,” or “I need to solve this problem.” Maybe you are intrigued. Maybe you want to find a way because the path that you were trying doesn’t work. Whether you go one way or another is often not in the feedback itself, but in the context in which this feedback is being provided.

Joel Miller:
You might not know this about me, but I love Russian literature. Actually, let me revise that statement. I don’t love Russian literature. I do love one particular Russian novelist. His name is Eugene Vodolazkin. The reason I love him is he has amazing thoughts in every one of his novels, including this from his novel, The Aviator, “Wisdom is experience more than anything,” but here’s the catch, “Experience that’s processed, of course,” he says, “If there’s no processing, then all the bruises you get are useless.” Here’s one thing I’ve learned about life. Bruises are worth something. You might as well get every bit of gain that you possibly can out of the pain you experience, and the way we do that is with feedback.
I’m Joel Miller and I’m the chief product officer here at Full Focus. Today, we’re going to jump into the question of feedback and we’re going to come at it from two angles. The first is going to be couched in a conversation between our founder and chairman, Michael Hyatt, and our CEO, Megan Hyatt Miller. They’re going to be talking about a unique framework for giving yourself feedback that is putting a mirror up to your own performance. It’s called the after action review, and it’s a super powerful and fairly simple framework for identifying areas in your performance where you could improve and giving you then a game plan for the improvement, but we’re not going to stop there. Following that, we’re going to go back to Ayelet Fishbach, who we started the show with. She’s going to talk to us about what feedback looks like in an organizational context, especially around what business owners can do to lead their teams through effective feedback so they get better results in the end.
One thing that we do at Full Focus, not only for ourselves but even in a group context, is an after action review. Pretty much after any major initiative or even smaller projects, what we’re trying to do is identify what we wanted, how it went, and where we could improve next time. What’s key about that is you can use that same strategy for yourself individually every week, really following anything that you might do. You want to be able to look in the mirror and take an honest assessment of your performance. What Michael and Megan are going to show right now is the after action review is that mirror, and it has the potential to be a pretty high definition mirror to enable you to spot flaws in your performance and where you can improve.

Michael Hyatt:
The thing about progress is if you want it to be faster and easier, you got to have a way to process feedback. One of the ways that we do that here at Full Focus, not only internally but with our clients, is a process called the after action review.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, this is so important because otherwise you keep making the same mistakes over and over again because you haven’t been intentional about culling the lessons out of the ones you’ve just made, or you aren’t able to be intentional about the things that worked because you don’t necessarily know why they worked or even that they worked in the way that they did, and so it just makes the future harder when you don’t have really concrete learnings from the past.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, so I was about to pick a fight with you, but now I’m not because you were covered.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Oh, good.

Michael Hyatt:
But I thought you were going to only talk about using this when there’s something negative that happens, like if a goal or an event goes poorly, but what happens is organizations that do that only use this, got to use a big word, episodically. They only use it when it’s some big failure and then they usually are too busy to do it anyway, but if you build this into your process that after any major event, after any major initiative, after the close of a calendar quarter, whatever it is, if you build this in, then it really works and you have the opportunity to note not only what didn’t work, but what did work. To your point, Megan, and now I’m just underscoring because you said it perfectly, but you want to capture both. You don’t want to forget why it worked, and you also don’t want to miss why it didn’t work because progress is incremental, and again, it happens with feedback. This is a process by which you can get that incremental feedback and steadily over time improve.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, well, there are two areas where we do this on a routine basis or one that’s routine and one that we are just in the process of completing right now. Every quarter, as we preview the coming quarter, we complete a quarterly preview as an executive team as well as individually on our own as leaders in the company. When we go through this process, it’s so helpful because what we’re trying to do is realign ourselves with our goals and our progress and really chart a relevant path forward using the learnings that have come from the previous quarters, and so it’s super helpful. It’s one of my favorite things that we do every quarter. Then another area where we’re currently using this right now is we just wrapped up our strategic planning process.
We’re about to go into budgeting, but all the goal setting and the update of our vision script and all of that has just been completed, and so Erin Perry, our chief experience officer, is walking through an after action review. I just had a meeting with her before we jumped on to record, and I was telling her how well I thought it went and some of the great things that had happened. She said, “Yeah, I see so many opportunities for improvement though,” and she had all these ideas and she said, “I’m really excited to dig into the after action review both to cement what went well and also to highlight the things that I want to change next year,” because by the time next year strategic planning rolls around, this will be just a distant memory. It’s a great way also to combat forgetfulness which is something that happens for all of us as business owners and leaders.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s awesome. Okay. Well, to your point also, this does apply to personal issues. This is something that my wife, Gail, and I have used after vacations to do an after action review on the vacation or to do some personal event, the remodel of a house or the renovation of a house. It works literally on anything where you want to improve and get better over time. I think that’s probably the filter. If you don’t have any intention to improve, you don’t need to use this, but if you’d like to improve, this is the best tool I know. We also have to say, Meg, I think that this is something we got from the US military, so this is not something we concocted out a whole cloth, but this was something that we first heard about because the military routinely uses this and so we did a deep dive into what they do and we extracted some things, added some things, and this is our version of it.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, so today, we’re going to walk you through five steps to using an after action review to improve your professional performance. It really, like you just said, that it works for anything really well, but especially when you’re thinking about optimizing results in your business, this is one of those processes that you want to just install in your business and have it become a professional habit for you and also for your team so that you really can be continuously improving as time goes on in your building and scaling your business.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, step one is to state what you wanted to do. If it’s a goal that you’re evaluating, then hopefully, you’ve stated that prior to the time you evaluate it, but even if it’s an event or it’s a vacation, it really helps to state your intention or the thing that you want to accomplish. One of the things I find is that once you state the intention, it’s very easy to marshal the resources and begin to focus on making it a great whatever, whether it’s a remodel or a product launch, or anything in your business. If you state the intention, it’s really helpful and it’ll be particularly important in the review if you’ve already pre-stated what it was that you wanted to accomplish.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, yeah. I think this is helpful because if you’re basically going to measure yourself against what you originally intended to do, you’ve got to start with what was the original outcome that you were after? What did you want to do? Otherwise, all the conversation about reviewing what happened, it can become kind of squishy. This is a deceptively simple part of the process but really important.

Michael Hyatt:
Which leads us to step two, state how far you got relative to the goal. Now, I get that sometimes goals in this sense are not in the smarter format that we teach. They may not be as specific or as measurable as you would like a vacation, for example. Maybe it’s some subjective thing, like you just wanted to get some rest, or you wanted to enjoy the company of others, or reconnect with your spouse or whatever, but to the extent that you can make it specific and measurable, the better off you’re going to be because then you’re going to have an objective metric to measure it against. If it was a product launch and you were committed to sell X number of units and that was your intention in step one, step two becomes very easy. You either got 70% of the way, or 82% of the way, or 105% of the way. Whatever it is, you’ve got something to measure it against.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, back to my example of strategic planning, in the second part of our strategic planning process, the outcome that we were after was to align our director level with the three-year vision that had been updated with the annual plan that the executives had created, and then for them to create project plans for how those goals would be accomplished as a part of the annual plan. Part of what we would be answering in this step too is, okay, how far did we get in terms of alignment and project planning with the directors specifically? That might be if we were evaluating that part of the process, that’s what we would be looking at, and obviously, something like alignment, it’s a little bit squishy, but you generally have a sense of at the end of that, I really felt like everybody was on the same page, they were excited about the future, or we had one or two people that just seemed unsettled by something or whatever it would be, but I think that’s how you analyze this with the goal in mind in step one.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, I don’t know about you, Meg, but I always like to give this a numeric value even if it’s a subjective measure. In other words, somebody said, “How rested were you?” Well, I think I got 85% of the way there. I’m obviously making that up. It’s totally subjective, but it does help me to just put a number on and think a little bit more analytically about it. Okay, step three, state what helped or hindered your performance. Now, I think there’s a caution in order here. What you don’t want to do is to first point to things outside of your control to make an excuse for poor performance. You might say, “Well, inflation is high and people just aren’t buying,” or you might say that there was some other factor. It’s not true anymore, but COVID shut us down or whatever. I think the place to start is first, as a leader with your own leadership, what was your own leadership in this event or this goal or whatever it was, and how did that influence the outcome?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right. Maybe you didn’t communicate often enough with people or you didn’t explain the context. In my strategic planning example, our alignment could have suffered if we hadn’t explained the context for the changes and the updates that we were making to the three-year vision. If we had just rolled it out with no explanation, it might have been difficult to get to a place of alignment because people wouldn’t have had the benefit of all that context. That depending on which end of that we fell on, would’ve either helped or hindered our performance toward creating alignment.
Yeah, that’s what you want to look at. I think you have to have a little conversation with yourself in advance and lower your defenses and not allow yourself to become defensive or perfectionistic because this is really something that you’re doing to improve. This is not about bringing the hammer down on yourself, so to speak, or inducing feelings of shame. That’s not the point. The point is just to really look objectively at the situation if you were an outside observer and answer the question, “What help or hindered your performance?” By focusing on yourself, but really choosing not to get defensive, you can learn a lot and there are opportunities for improvement, even if it went really well, that will help you next time.

Michael Hyatt:
This is one of those places too, Megan, where I like to use the language of what was missing versus what was wrong because I think when you look at what was missing, it helps you to detach from it and personalize it so you can be objective about it. Again, I think I’d start with my leadership, and it’s not by the way, just when you miss a big goal or the event goes badly, but even when the positive things happen. I think leaders are sometimes reluctant to take credit, but I think it’s important because if you want to keep showing up the way that you showed up on that last initiative that you’re now evaluating, you got to point out what you did right so that you cement those into your mental framework and into your character so that you do it again next time you do the thing like this that you keep showing up like that.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I’ve had a lot of conversations with my executive team over the years, particularly in one-on-one meetings where I have asked them to identify positively what was it about your leadership that enabled you to achieve these results. They’re always squirmy about it and uncomfortable. The truth is I think I would be the same way because if we’re good leaders, we’re used to really calling out the contribution of our team and not making it about us and all those great things, but what I have explained to them, and this seems to always help, is, listen, we want to identify what about your leadership style, the things that you’re doing, the actions you’re taking, the ways you’re thinking, all that really work so that you can recreate it almost like a recipe.
We want you to get really clear on what your recipe is that works. The only way we can do that is to call those things out and really objectify them so that next time, you don’t have to figure it out like it’s the first time ever. You can just go back to what you know is successful and helpful. Obviously, the same is true in understanding what your recipe is for things not going well is also helpful, but I think in general, high performing leaders tend to spend less time focusing on what they’re doing well than what they’re not doing well.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s good. I like the metaphor of a recipe because that’s exactly what you’re trying to do. If you made a cake and it turned out great and everybody raved about it, you want to capture that so that next time you make a cake, it’s not such a guessing game. Okay, that brings us to step four, state what you want to keep doing, what you want to improve, what you want to stop doing, and what you want to start doing. You can’t see this on our talking points, but that fits the acronym KISS. Let’s talk about those four elements. Typically, when I lead people through this or I lead myself through it, I just draw a two by two quadrant, so I’ve got four quadrants and I label one of these, keep doing, one of them improve, one of them start doing, and one stop doing. What do you see as the value of that, Meg?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, first of all, I like breaking it down into these components because it can feel a little overwhelming if you were to try to go through this exercise and not have a way to chunk it down into something smaller. I think it just helps your brain go to work on finding the answers to these things without it getting to be overwhelming, but the first one, the K, keep, is really what we were just talking about. These are the things you want to keep doing. This is part of your recipe. These are the things you don’t want to lose, you don’t want to forget because they really worked and you’re going to want to apply them in the future. It’s very helpful even though this is probably the easiest part and the part that everybody feels like they already know to go ahead and identify what are the things that you want to keep.
Then you get to improve, the I of KISS, and improving, that’s fun because this is where probably all of us are wired and we are already thinking about, “What could we make better?” This is the, “What could we make better in this thing?” The truth is, even if whatever you did, whether it was a product launch or hiring a big position or leading some kind of event with your team or whatever, even if it was great, it can always be better. Sometimes, it’s the most fun to think about what can be improved when it’s already really good. I really like this one. Okay, so we’ve done keep, improve, and now we have stop. It’s so important to answer the question about, “What are you not going to do anymore?”
There are probably things whether whatever you’re evaluating went really well or did not go well that are inefficient, that didn’t help to achieve the desired result, that the ROI just wasn’t there, that are totally detrimental to the outcome you’re committed to. There’s obviously a spectrum there, but this is really important to think through because one of the things that we see happen with our clients and also with ourselves if we’re not diligent about doing this exercise is that you just accumulate things that drive inefficiency or cost or activity on your part or your team’s part that aren’t really delivering the result.
We always want to be editing. We always want to be taking things away that are not necessary, and so this is a great discipline to ask yourself the question, “What are we going to stop?” Then lastly, we have keep, improve, stop, and start. What are you going to start doing? Now that you’ve thought through all of these other areas, what are you going to start doing? This really becomes actionable things. That you’re going to add, things that you’re going to do to improve the outcome next time. This will be really how you mobilize your team or the people that are helping you the next time it comes around to do something like this. I think that this tends to be a fun one as well because now you’re in the future, you’re not thinking about the past. You’ve made the transition to thinking about how to improve for the future.

Michael Hyatt:
That brings us to the final step, step five, review and factor into your next action. We obviously want to use this for the future, so think of this as an after action preview. We want to be able to document this, capture this, so that the next time we take out a product that’s similar, next time we bake this cake, we’ve got this document to inform how we bake it so that it’s a better cake. Now, the way that I do this is that once we’ve captured it into a form to the after action review itself, then Jim, my assistant, just cues it up for the next time that we do it and he gives it to me, so that right before I do that next thing, the next opportunity I have to do that thing, I’ve got the after action review and I can make sure that I don’t repeat the mistakes of the past or I don’t forget what I did right that led to that successful outcome.
That’s really important because sometimes there are events or things, like I have a board meeting that I do twice a year, and I may forget. I slipped since the last board meeting and I forget. I forget what worked, I forget what didn’t work, and so then I’m just destined to keep repeating similar mistakes if I don’t capture it somehow in a document and then review it prior to the next occurrence.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, I feel the same way. I’ve used a strategic planning example several times and that’s something we only do once a year. By the time next year rolls around and it’s this time, it’s the end of the summer, early fall, actually we’ll be planning for that much earlier in the year, and we will not remember the lesson. Same is true for our annual team meeting. That’s something we only do once a year, but it’s incredibly important from an alignment standpoint. There’s no way that we can execute successfully on our annual plan unless we effectively cast the vision for the next three years and for the next year with our team such that they’re aligned and they can all go execute in the same direction. I don’t want to forget, for example, that this part took too long or that part would’ve been better if only X, Y, Z. It’s so helpful and so we begin most of our planning processes by pulling up our after action review, and it’s just great to have it captured somewhere so you don’t have to try to remember. That just gets harder and harder as time goes on.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s the after action review. I want to encourage you, guys, to give it a try. Again, it consists of five steps. Step one, state what you wanted to do. Step two, state how far you got relative to the goal. Step three, state what helped or hindered your performance. Step four, state what you want to keep doing, improve, stop doing, or start doing. In step number five, review and factor into your next action.

Joel Miller:
At Full Focus, we love the after action review so much we actually baked it into the Full Focus planner. If you’re a regular user, you already know this. It is in every weekly preview. It’s also in the quarterly preview. As you are busy assessing your performance from the week, we walk you through an after action review that you simply follow every time you do the weekly preview. Again, every time you do the quarterly preview. It’s simple but powerful. In fact, whenever we hear from clients about it, they’re raving. They love this and can’t even imagine stepping into their next week without having done this for their current week.
Now, that’s you as an individual, but let’s expand this conversation a bit because most of us aren’t on our own. We work on teams. Sometimes, we are leaders of teams. If you’re a business owner, that’s obviously true, but if you are a member of a team, this is also a reality for you. Feedback is just part of the job. You, as a business owner, need to provide feedback for teammates. They’re going to provide feedback for you. Wherever you fit on a team, feedback is just part of the currency of communication in an organization. Everyone needs to know how they are doing and that means feedback is a constant. It’s in the air, it’s in messages, it’s really everywhere you turn. That’s why we need to learn how to get better at it. Not only understanding it, but learning how to give it ourselves and how to receive it. Coming up, we’re going to explore another dimension of feedback. That’s after the break.
Now that we’ve discussed feedback in a personal context, let’s talk about it in an organizational context. The way we should do this is to pick up our conversation with Ayelet Fishbach that we started the show with. Ayelet is the author of Get It Done, which is a book that goes deep into the science of motivation. One of the chapters specifically involves feedback, and I thought it would be great to have her on the show to help apply some of what she shares in that book to a business. Now that we know what feedback looks like personally, let’s learn how to apply it more broadly with our teams. Failure provides helpful lessons for improved performance, but as you say in your book, Get It Done, we rarely learn what we could from negative feedback. Why is that?

Ayelet Fishbach:
Yes, we don’t learn enough from negative feedback. Now, this is not to say that there is no information there. Just that it’s really hard to learn and there are two main barriers. One is emotional. It hurts the ego. It hurts our self-esteem. It’s unpleasant to fail. The other one is cognitive. It is harder to learn the right way from the wrong way. It requires this mental switch that if that did not work, then I should try something else. As it turned out, this is something that people are struggling with.

Joel Miller:
There’s some translation that has to happen to get good feedback out of bad information.

Ayelet Fishbach:
It is less direct. It’s basically not as immediate as learning from positive feedback. Positive feedback is what you’ve done is great. Just do it again. Just keep going. Just do what you are already doing. Negative feedback is that you need to change. What you were doing is not quite right and now you need to infer what is the correct answer. We actually played games with people where we were showing that it is very hard for them to learn from negative feedback. They basically forget to do the switch to say if it’s not A, then it’s must be B.

Joel Miller:
How would you help coach people to do that switch? As you said, when you get positive information, you just know, “All right, I’ll keep doing that again and again.” Whereas if it’s negative, you could go wrong not just one way, you could be going wrong multiple ways. How do you help coach people to make the switch so they can begin analyzing all the ways in which they might have gone wrong to try a new method?

Ayelet Fishbach:
Let me step back and say that you are describing a situation where positive feedback is better because there is only one way to get it right and so many ways to get it wrong. Now, that is sometimes the case, but not always. There are many situations and I would say that there are many situations in which there are many ways to be successful, but only few ways to fail. Let’s say there are many great mentors in my new company and only one that I should avoid. If I will work with that person, they are not going to be helpful, in which case, there is actually more information in the negative feedback.
Trying to work with that person and that not working out is much more meaningful in terms of the objective value of the information, but regardless of what is the environment, and we do often analyze the environment to understand which feedback is useful, regardless of that, negative feedback requires in faring that this thing doesn’t work. Therefore, I should choose another. This is harder for people. You are asking how to help them learn. Well, I would ask whether the barrier is indeed cognitive, whether they don’t see the information, or is it more emotional? They see the information but they don’t want to go there, or they don’t see the information because they were used to go there. We went studies in which we gave people negative feedback and then asked them what was the answer on which they received negative feedback, and we found that most people don’t remember the answer.
We learn from that often that it’s not that you don’t know how to use the information. It’s that it is so unpleasant to engage with the information that you never pay attention in the first place. You never quite notice and quite keep it in your working memory so that you can use it. If the barrier is that you need to walk this extra step, you need to infer yes from what’s no, the remedies would be to reduce the required effort to help people learn to increase the time that is devoted to learning. Then that means that after getting some bad results or negative feedback, we want to guide people through the learning. We want them to think with us about what can be taken from this, how can that help me do better at next time, and give it probably more time than what we need to give learning from positive feedback.

Joel Miller:
If you’re a person that is growth-minded, when you confront negative information, your tendency is going to be to want to grow, want to get past it, want to overcome it in some way. Whereas if you have that more limited mindset, you’re going to hit the wall and think, “Well, I guess there’s a wall there,” and then disengage.

Ayelet Fishbach:
Yes, Carol Dweck talks about growth mindset as the understanding that you learn from your experiences, that if you burnt your dinner, well maybe you don’t have anything to eat, but you have learned something about cooking. You have a lesson to take with you. If you lost your job, if a project failed, there is a lesson for life. There is something to learn. The alternative in Dweck’s paradigm is that you learn that you are just unable to do it, that you are not a good person, that you’re not a capable person. Again, in this paradigm, we see that there are two possible lessons except of one of them is more adaptive to the other. Carol was basically well-eased basically trying to help people secure the ego so they learn from their experiences.
I also want to maybe make a distinction between failure and mistake. A mistake is a decision that you were never supposed to make. That was the wrong answer. A failure is something that maybe you did everything right, but you just by chance did not get the results that you were hoping to get. Learning is often hard because you need to understand where you needed to make a different decision, or maybe your decision, your actions were right. It just that you were unlucky. You were getting the small chance of bad outcome over the large chance of good outcome in case your decision was correct, was the right decision.

Joel Miller:
When we think about failure, a business owner doesn’t experience it from simply one dimension, their own performance. They also experience it from the dimension of the whole organization. What does that kind of failure look like? Then they also experience it from the dimension of their teammates, the people that they are responsible for mentoring, for coaching with feedback. Because of that multidimensionality, I wanted to talk with Ayelet about the way a business owner can process failure across all those dimensions, how they can manage to deal with things when they don’t go according to plan.

Ayelet Fishbach:
As a team, we have made progress in our understanding of the problem. We at least crossed out one strategy that doesn’t work very well, at least not in this conditions. The team needs to understand what happened. Now, the team also needs to understand that this setback is a reason to work harder, to try harder to meet the goals. There are basically two inferences that you can make after a setback for the team. One is this doesn’t work and let’s just disengage with the team. Let’s just try to do something else.
The other one is just the opposite. That did not work. Therefore, we need to work harder. Therefore, we need to invest more resources in the team. Stay there, learn what you can learn, extract the lessons, but also in terms of motivation, think about this as lack of progress, not as lack of commitment. It’s not that we don’t care about the team. It’s not that we don’t care about our success because we had a bad experience. It’s that we have not made enough progress and therefore we are going to give it a bit more attention. We are going to try a bit harder to catch up with what we couldn’t quite achieve.

Joel Miller:
A moment ago when you were talking about forcing people to learn, putting them in the context where they couldn’t avoid it, that seems to me like something a business leader can do with employees where an employee, business owner too, might for their own purposes be more inclined to duck or put a failure behind them quickly. In the context of you’re the business leader and you’re responsible for mentoring these teammates, you may be able to create contexts in which that learning is forced or that learning is at least unavoidable, a meeting where that’s discussed or a process whereby that is fleshed out so that those performance gaps can be exposed and the learning can then happen.

Ayelet Fishbach:
Absolutely. To give you an example for why that might not be intuitive, there is an exercise that I run in my management class every year where I assign half of the class to give feedback to the other half. Now, this is one on one so every student is matched with another student and they are giving them feedback, and they’re giving them feedback about the good things and the bad things, say what they do well, what they don’t do well. What people intuitively do is bury their negative feedback in between what they refer to as the sandwich method. They bury it in the middle when we know people don’t pay attention and they say very little about it.
Later, when I asked the people who received feedback, “What did you hear?”, they say, “I heard that I’m great. I have had no awareness of anything that is wrong with my performance based on the feedback that I received.” Then I asked the other party. Well, this half of the class, they did not hear a single thing that they need to improve. I’m like, “What happened?”, and they say, “Well, we mentioned it barely in the middle. We can see how they didn’t quite remember that.” Give feedback such that your audience can process that it gets at the time that it’s not buried under some other information.

Joel Miller:
That’s fascinating and makes total sense. We want to avoid the prickly feeling of having done poorly and so we can avoid it, and if the people sharing that news with us are avoiding it also, of course, it gets lost. What about from an organizational perspective, from the overall enterprise perspective, how can a business leader, a business owner, how can they frame those failures or setbacks in a way that are positive for the team?

Ayelet Fishbach:
They need to have a very clear mechanism for learning for mistakes and learning from failures that are not a result of mistake. They cannot just assume that it happens intuitively. It’s often easy to assume that learning will just happen. We say people just learn from experience. Just be here, just stick around, and you will learn. That works better for successes. People do intuitively learn from their successes. As a business leader, you need to know what is the mechanism there. I will give actually example from research. For many years, the way we conducted studies in the behavioral science was such that we published the results that were just as we expected. Those are the papers that are out there. For results that didn’t work out, case studies that failed, we buried them.
In recent years as a field, we started to pre-register our hypothesis and pre-register our studies such that before we run the study, we say what we expect to happen, and when that doesn’t happen, we have a document showing us, “This is what you expected. This is what happened. That did not work out,” and now I can have a meeting with my lab, which is basically the group of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows that work with me, and think about what have we learned from that. We can have a conversation, but that was not intuitive. That really had to become part of the culture or part of how we do things here.

Joel Miller:
On the side of a business owner themselves and their own personal failures, how can a business owner stay motivated when they themselves are facing setbacks? What does it look like to light your own fire? What does it look like to face a failure and stay engaged regardless?

Ayelet Fishbach:
Let me offer a few strategies. One is look back at what you have achieved. They consider your experience, your expertise. Why are you the leader and not someone else? What do you bring to the table? Looking back is often a way to maintain your motivation. In particular, when you have setbacks, it’s a way to remind yourself that you are committed. We see that employees and managers, when they reflect on what they’ve already achieved, they’re more committed, they’re more willing to learn from setbacks. Realize also that when everything goes well, you are much less needed than when there is trouble. It’s a difficult time when leadership matters.
I sometimes refer to the conductors in an orchestra. By the time the orchestra performs and they already know exactly what they’re doing and everything is great, the conductor is really more of a decoration, kind of an extra help. They don’t really need that person. It’s when they are struggling, when there are difficulties that you need that person. Remind yourself that you are much more important when things are bad, when it’s not the best time for your company or your team. Try to remove your ego from your failure. Your ego often stands in the way. Try to think about what an external observer may have been thinking and doing in this situation.
Ethan Kross has this wonderful strategy of talking to yourself in a third party perspective. For me, it should be asking like I yell at how did you mess it up and I yell at what went wrong here. Many people do it intuitively. I’m not. I kind of have to consciously talk to myself from some distance to analyze what I did wrong and what there is to learn. Certain cultures are much better at learning for failures, at celebrating failures, and getting together, and think about how to do it better so I would mention that as well. I think that these are several strategies that you can use for yourself to help yourself learn and move forward when it’s difficult.

Joel Miller:
What about employees hiding or just keeping failure in the dark? Nobody wants to go to their boss and report failure, so there’s a tendency to sweep it under the rug or hide it behind the closet or whatever. How can employers, how can business owners help encourage their employees to bring them the bad news?

Ayelet Fishbach:
Yeah, this is the shoot the messenger phenomenon. I don’t want to be the person who delivers bad news because you will look at me and think trouble. That is real. It is very hard to completely avoid it. Obviously, when an employee comes to you with great news, you are going to be happy and happy for them and happy for the organization and they will get it. It’s very tempting to keep setbacks to ourselves, but what we can do is having a mechanism by which we reward people for bad news. Having a mechanism by which when someone tells me about something that did not work out, when they deliver these news, first I congratulate them. I stop to ask what we have learned and I also say, “Thank you for bringing this to my attention.” This is really important that we know that it takes training. You have to think about the bad news that you are getting. It’s like someone just gave you some medical diagnosis that is unpleasant but will save your life. You are grateful. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Let’s see what we can do here.”

Joel Miller:
Based on everything we’ve heard so far, what we can deduce is that feedback is an essential part of learning, and that means, honestly, that failure is an essential part of learning. Let’s ask Ayelet this question. How can we reframe failure so that it is not a mark against us so much as a tool for learning, a tool for improvement?

Ayelet Fishbach:
Well, let’s go with less difficult because it’s going to be difficult to learn from failure. Let’s think about this in terms of learning experience and let’s remind ourselves that there is actually great information in failure. Here’s an example for that. When we analyze consumers’ reviews, we find that negative reviews are actually a better predictor of success than positive reviews. This is not to say that if you have negative reviews, you will be successful. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that if I just look at the negative reviews, I can see which product is going to do better because the product that has negative reviews that complain about shipping is going to do much better than the product that has negative reviews that complain that this doesn’t work.
Positive reviews that tend to be very similar, and so they just don’t contain this variant that helps us predict success. Ultimately, we want to predict success, we want to motivate success. Those two will be better if we pay attention to failure. Failure helps us know what product is going to be successful, what strategy is going to be successful. If we learn from failure, failure can motivate success, and so you should pay attention to failure because you care about success.

Joel Miller:
Ayelet Fishbach, thank you for being with us.

Ayelet Fishbach:
Thank you for having me, Joel.

Joel Miller:
There’s a lot of things we could say about failure, but one thing is true no matter what your take on it is, and no matter really how you feel about it. Failure is information. The question that we have been trying to really get at in this entire episode is, what do you do with that information? That information is the key to improved performance. It’s the key to figuring out how to make things go better next time, but only if we learn. Go back to that quote from Vodolazkin at the top of the show. If you get some bruises, you might as well make them worth it. The only way to make them worth it is to learn from them, to process them, so that as you move forward next time with something similar or even the very same thing, you’re doing it from a place of experience with the better knowledge of what’ll work and what won’t, so that you can get the results you’re after.
That’s it for another episode of the Business Accelerator Podcast. If you’re a business owner and you’re interested in learning more about our Business Accelerator Coaching Program, go to businessaccelerator.com. We help successful but overwhelmed small business owners just like you scale yourself and your business so you can win at work and succeed at life. It’s what we call the double win. If you want to experience that for yourself, go to businessaccelerator.com. Finally, I wanted to give you one little tip about feedback, and here’s what we’re going to do. This is an exercise. You can feel free to just step right into this. This is going to be a little experiment.
I’d love it if you would just pick up your phone, whatever device you’re listening to this podcast on, go to the app upon which you are listening to this podcast, and are you ready for this? You knew it was coming. Leave a review. Whenever feedback occurs to you, it’s best to give it as soon as it occurs to you or right at appropriate time. If for instance, you’re actually driving right now, please do not do what I just suggested. If you are, however, in a safe place, go ahead, get that app, leave a review. We’d love to hear what you have to say. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week with another conversation to help accelerate your business.