Many of you may have watched the women’s Wimbledon Finals and, like me, were disappointed about the performance of Amanda Anisimova. Her loss was significant, but as I listened to her concession speech, I was impressed with her poise and how she was thinking about it. She was gracious but still thoughtful. Apparently I was not the only one that was impressed. The NYTimes had the following headline – Why Amanda Anisimova’s emotional post-match interview was a masterclass in handling failure. The article goes on to describe how she, and other tennis champions, have used a terribly disappointing loss to fuel their future work to improve.
The article then goes on to describe work done by Amy Edmondson that makes it clear that failure is a way for people as well as industries, to improve the work they do. Some companies talk about “fail fast” – in other words, try things and take risks, but determine those things are working early on and learn lessons. Then try again.
In healthcare “failure” is often seen as shameful and something to avoid at all costs. Yet, we are all humans and we are working in incredibly complex systems with huge challenges. There is no avoiding that mistakes and failures happen in our systems. Usually, there is an individual associated with that failure and it is all too easy to blame, vilify and punish that individual. Yet, this rarely will make a system safer. If you want your system to learn and improve, you need to create a culture that can learn from failure rather than assuming there is a “bad apple” that can be removed. David Marx has discussed the idea of the Just Culture for years. I have discussed the Just Culture as well in several prior posts.
I am sorry that Amanda didn’t win her match, but she is using the right approach to improve and return to a Championship. I wasn’t looking for a lesson on culture and systems improvement from a tennis match, but I sure got one!