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Themes of confession and repentance connect across faith traditions and reinforce important traits for those in positions of authority, writes the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
Failure:Lab holds TED-like events at which successful people talk about a personal struggle or failure.
Photo courtesy of Failure Lab
Honest conversations about failure help people realize that they are not alone in their struggles, and that can give them the encouragement to succeed, says a founding partner of Failure:Lab.
Illustration by Claire Doyle Ragin
Is good always the enemy of great? Or can insisting on doing everything right prevent us from taking action at all?
One of the activities our institutions should regularly engage in is a candid debriefing of the experiments we are trying.
Executives who can articulate what they learned from failed choices can recover and move on. The key to learning to do that is to ask for and offer clear feedback.
Rather than avoiding it, how might your institution encourage and embrace moments of failure?
A young scientist was discouraged by how often his experiments led nowhere. And then he figured out that repeated experimenting and failure was the path to groundbreaking solutions.
The problem is not just that some Christian institutions are failing but that we are not experimenting, failing and then learning from our missteps to create more sustainable, innovative institutions.
Christians need leaders -- and institutions -- to train us in how to fail.
The writing of David Foster Wallace teaches Christian leaders to risk failure.