Redemption Song.

It's a little known fact that I love reggae. Bob Marley to be absolutely specific.

Or that one of my lockdown pleasures was learning to play the guitar with my kids.

So I’ve had fun recently trying to master ‘Redemption Song’ , one of my all time favourite songs.

Learning the guitar from scratch has been an exercise in leaning into my complete incompetence with a brash optimism that I might get somewhere. A low stakes test of my own growth mindset.

And learning to rock out alongside my young son has also given me a lot of joy. I watch in wonder as he picks up basic chords through the simple practice of whacking his fingers down roughly on the strings and giving it a go.

We sound like we’re killing cats most of the time but with a little perseverance we’re now able to strum a few recognisable tunes together.

Multiple failure leads to mastery

Learning the guitar got me noticing again that mastering any hard skill requires multiple failure. Getting it wrong repeatedly is essential to ultimately getting it right.

I also noticed the best of our progress would come after taking a break for a few days then coming back to try again. A magic trick by our brains to join the dots, integrate our learning and somehow make our fingers move that little bit more quickly when we come back to play again.

Luckily with this learning experiment, the stakes are low so nobody gets hurt and not much is at risk - apart from my neighbours ears perhaps…

But what happens when, as leaders, we reach for a bigger goal, the stakes are much higher and we experience crushing failure? How then to stay focussed on the learning?

Finding Redemption in High Stakes Failure

When staring at the wreckage of an almighty screw up, there’s a lot to be gained from keeping faith with the same fundamental principle that failure = learning. To get to the heart of the learning, here’s a suggested process I’ve gleaned from past major failures:

• Investigate with Curiosity

Even when the disappointment is crushing, stop, reflect and look directly at the steaming pile that represents your failure. Look with curiosity for the learning.

It feels gut-wrenchingly horrible to start with but breaking down your initial reflections on paper is a great starting point. If other people are involved, get their initial take on things and listen with as much openness as you can muster to get their honest view.

Ask yourself, as well as identifying the things that went wrong, what did you actually do well or get right?

• Own it

Consumed by the pain of failure, it's comforting to rail about pointing the finger at other people or external forces. But once we’ve got comfy working through a basic version of events, it's essential to name our own part of the mess and identify what we got wrong personally. This step is key if we’re going to stop ourselves repeating destructive patterns in the future.

Situations are rarely completely black and white. Where might our own behaviour have strayed into the grey?

• Forgive ourselves. Forgive everyone else.

When we’ve had a good think about what happened, it helps enormously to forgive ourselves and anyone else involved in a big failure. This isn’t a click your fingers and it's done, one off exercise, more of a daily meditation or practice.

How might we build compassion for ourselves and others into our daily routine so that we develop the resilience we need to try and trust again?

• Dig Deeper

Time is healer for many people but it can also be a great teacher. A wise friend of mine reflected that with a big failure ‘there’s extra layers of learning’ that you only access with the benefit of time. The bigger, dirtier the pit, the more gold you’re likely to find, if you put in the work to revisit the experience from time to time.

With the benefit of a bit of distance, how might your biggest mistake turn out to be your most valuable learning experience?

So sometimes it helps to learn our own Redemption Song. To spend time exploring our own dark chapters.

With courage and commitment we can integrate deep learning won from painful failure into what we do in the future.

“None but ourselves can free our minds”

Bob Marley