A NDY REED
LEARNING
FROM FAILURE Failure is a key stage in the journey to success, and learning from each others’ mistakes can only help the sports sector, says Andy Reed © SHUTTERSTOCK/DENIS KUVAEV
P
rofessional athletes are excellent at learning from defeat. Listen to any champion or winning team and they will often refer back to how defeats
and failures in their careers defined them. I’ve been inspired recently by the book Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed, which says that failure is an important stage in the journey to success, and suggests ways to change perspective and admit mistakes. I’ve been looking across our sector to see how successful we are at learning from failure. Frankly, what I discovered was a culture that doesn’t even embrace sharing best practice, never mind admitting failures. In fact, there appears to be a culture of denial.
Athletes learn from their failures to become better. Why doesn’t the sports sector?
In the work I do to support tech startups, I’ve come to learn that the most
when to stop a new programme if it isn’t
important thing is to fail faster than the
working, rather than just ploughing on.
competition. The pace of change means you can’t sit around waiting to create the perfect solution. We need this speed of innovation in all areas of our sector too.
An honest approach
Learn from the mistakes of others – you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself
This applies to the government, funders and those developing projects.
Learning from each other As Matthew Syed says in his book: “Learn from the mistakes of others – you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
In the summer of 2017, Street League
This project is vital to our sector. We
published its annual report. What was new was the healthy admission of where the
Creating a new culture
need to start opening up and sharing
organisation had failed in its outcomes,
In partnership, the Sports Think Tank
our mistakes, so we stop repeating
rather than just trumpeting all of its
and Upshot are creating the resources,
them. The culture of admitting mistakes
successes as most annual reports do.
and a conference in the autumn, to
needs to change with both funders
open up the debate. We want to create
and those delivering sport and PA,
programmes failed to meet their goals
a culture in which we seek out failure
developing a much more mature open
created a lot of healthy headlines. In this
in the same way as we do success.
relationship of trust and co-creation.
Being open about where the
sector it seemed quite groundbreaking. Take for instance the failure of
When people are confronted with evidence that challenges our deeply held
spogo. We all know it failed but I can’t
beliefs, research has shown that they
find the lessons learned anywhere. We
are more likely to reframe the evidence
need to create a culture for our sector
than alter their beliefs. We need to
where we talk and share openly.
challenge this thinking. We need to learn
sportsmanagement.co.uk
Perhaps then we can really start to impact on our nation’s activity levels. ●
Andy Reed is the founder of Sports Think Tank, former MP for Loughborough, and chair of SAPCA sportsthinktank.com ISSUE 3 2018
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