Seen.
Who Dares Fails?
This week we saw a story about a training exercise used by the Special Boat Services.
The process involves disorientating candidates, passing them a firearm and a set of specific instructions about who they are required to shoot.
Candidates tend to shoot the wrong person.
This is the intended outcome because they are being taught what it feels like to fail.
This allows reflection on avoiding failure, and also on how to recover quickly when it happens so one failure is not then compounded by a sequence of further errors.
We know that letting people fail can be important if you want a team to stretch and take risks. But how could you train them in the art of failing well?
Read.
Who Knows Wins?
This article in the Times discusses whether the credit for Lewis Hamilton's triumph on the race track should belong to him, or to Mercedes, who made his car.
It argues that this misses the point.
The author attributes the success to a seamless merging of both through the emergence of a "transactive memory".
Transactive memory describes using another person's brain to store information. We all do it. Often with our spouses or partners. There are things we don't think about or remember, because we know that they will. This frees up space in our minds for other things.
In a team context, each member gains access to the team's unique cloud storage service. This increases the effectiveness of each member and of the team overall.
What could you do to upgrade your team's capacity to offer transactive memory?
Learned.
Who Counts Learns?
When trying to agree a deal, there is moment when numbers are shared for the first time.
We've seen a lot of deals go no further: The numbers are completely outside expectation so someone takes offence and walks away.
However, the emotional reaction is not to the numbers. Numbers can't stimulate feelings, because they don't have any. People do.
The emotional reaction is often to what the numbers cause you to assume the other person thinks or feels about something important to you.
This is why initial emotional reactions can mislead us. They are not based on truth, but an assumption.
If we can spot and manage the emotion, we have an opportunity to understand the other party's perspective. This usually starts with asking them, without pre-judging based on emotion.
Then it may be the right decision to walk away. Or it may not.
Either way, you've learned something.
And finally.
Every week, we each bring something we've seen, something we've read, and something we've learned to the table. That's nine #founderhacks per week. We vote on three to share with you.
This means we have 132 #founderhacks that have never seen the light of day.
We might write them all up one day, but for now as a bit of a Christmas special we're going to sift through them to find those shiny jewels that remain.
We'll share these in a Christmas special podcast featuring our favouritest #founderhacks from 2020 that never were.
Ben's also trying to work out how to put sleigh bells on the jingle. Watch this space.
Don’t forget to check out the accompanying podcast version of #founderhacks for a tantalising live experience of team atomex!
