Recently, I've had a lot of conversations about failure, mistakes, setbacks, and challenges... and how to recover from any or all of these. And one thing I keep coming back to in my ruminations is this: too often, we conflate "mistakes" with "failure." They are not the same thing, and it matters. Here's why...
Both are opportunities for learning and growth but in very different ways.
A mistake is foreseeable. It's an incorrect action, a misstep. The email you prematurely hit "send" on. The confidential information you inadvertently let slip. The senior associate you mistook for the paralegal (didn't that happen in an episode of "Partner Track"?). The takeaway is this: how can I ensure I never do that again? Mistakes are natural and normal and are part of the learning process. Nobody can get through life without making mistakes. When you make a mistake, you should seek to put measures in place to prevent making the same or similar mistakes in the future.
Failure, on the other hand, is thoughtful and even intentional. Failure results from an unsuccessful attempt or experiment - a calculated risk. You're trying something new, and you don't know the outcome. You do your best to ensure success, but you can't anticipate all variables, and you can't predict the outcome. Learning from a failure involves analyzing why the attempt was unsuccessful and what course correction might make a future effort successful. Unlike mistakes, which everyone will make occasionally, failure can generally be avoided - simply by not taking risks.
"Big law" is a risk-averse industry (we're lawyers, after all, avoiding risk is part of the job). We have little appetite for failure. So when we take a risk and fail, we tend to treat it like a mistake. Too often, we abandon the project altogether and put measures in place to avoid making the same "mistake" in the future.
Most recently, this tendency appears to affect discussions around hybrid work. Nearly three years ago, we were forced to take a giant leap in moving to an entirely remote workforce - something that would have been a considerable risk had we not all been forced into it. But in the return, many have tended to see any failure in remote work as evidence that hybrid work is a "mistake" and that we ought to revert to a safer option: the pre-pandemic "normal," or as close to it as we can get.
But to do this is to swim against a fierce tide. Every indication is that hybrid work is here to stay. Talent is demanding it. And even if we can temporarily push back in a slower economy, the result will only be to delay rather than change the eventual outcome. The economy will pick up again, and in the competition for talent, associates will ask for autonomy and flexibility.
So, as firms assess where to go from here, they should embrace failure, examine it, and keep trying. Perhaps we will see firms that went entirely remote walk that back a bit to retain more "hybrid" benefits. Other firms might experiment with different formulations of a hybrid model. It will likely take several tries - and failures - before we get it right. This is new territory for everyone. But, I believe that at the end of the day, the firms that succeed will be the ones that are willing to fail - carefully and thoughtfully - in pursuit of that success.
By: Kandice Thorn, Founder, WorkBetter for Lawyers
Comments