Failure is an Option

My classmate Nicole works at a college that supports and trains musicians and she brought up a difficulty they have in recruiting folks.

My son is currently in the orchestra at his school and it is my first experience in any way with orchestra and bands in general. You have described quite precisely what I see when I go to their concerts, and what he tells me. 

In the Army we had a "fall out two" drill where in the middle of an exercise the two leaders in an team were eliminated and the next team member would have to immediately step up and lead the team through the drill or exercise. It was a great opportunity to test up and coming leaders, keep them sharp and attuned, and keep everyone beneath that leader ready to take charge in case they were needed. It certainly proves that with good processes and procedures, teams can overcome whatever leadership challenge (good leader vs bad leader) they may encounter. 

Regarding Nicole, again I'll refer to my military background. Our regimental motto was "Sua Sponte" meaning "of their own accord." To our unit this meant that there was no need to wait for orders, but we should do what we thought was right in the absence of orders. We many times took this beyond that to "do what we think is right and explain it later." Any time we went off script and were challenged about it later, whether we were successful or even when we failed, the standard response to a question like "Why the heck did you do that?" was "Sua Sponte Sir." It acted as a get-out-of-jail-free card. 

It makes me think of a program I read about years ago (I wish I could find it) that discussed the promotion of project failure in silicon valley teams. Executives at software firms were concerned that their teams weren't thinking outside the box enough. They were insulating themselves from any failure to the point where they were afraid to try new things. These leaders instituted a program where teams had to have a certain number of failed projects a quarter in order to receive their full bonuses. 

Back to your challenge . . . I think we need more Sua Sponte attitude in our society. I know I've been reprimanded for going off script in my organization, but then I've also been lauded at different times. Being a great leader takes failure and learning from failure. 

One of the best features (I find) of those military exercises were always the AAR or after action review. Every exercise, good or bad, had an AAR where the focus was on what happened, what went right and what went wrong, and what could be done better next time. Looking at the oil refining industry I see something similar with our loss investigations, but I don't see it with enough projects to really allow and help change occur. I just completed a very large project and suggested that we do an AAR to discuss what could be done better next time and was told we needed to move forward on the next project. I think too often we don't do these AAR steps and it comes back to bite us in the future. 

I found this article (here (Links to an external site.)) which isn't the one I was remembering, but is close.