Falling Forward
Walking is easy. I mean really, how hard can it be? When in good health, most of us walk every single day of our lives. In fact, it is so easy, that we are able to teach babies that are barely one-year-olds how to do it. My youngest granddaughter will be figuring it out soon enough. Her older sister, now just two years old, has not only mastered the skill, she is now running, jumping, climbing, dancing, hopping, skipping, and able to get into just about every kind of mischief that she can dream up, all on her own ambulatory locomotion. She is truly MOBILE!
When you think of the physics involved in walking, it can’t really be that hard either. Learn to stand erect and to keep your center of gravity placed directly over your feet. If the CG of your body deviates to the left or right, or to the fore or aft, simply use the muscles in your legs and core to move it back into position and “ta-da!”, you are standing. Now to walk, simply propel your center of mass forward by pushing off of your back leg thus moving your CG forward of your other foot. Here is the tricky part, as you start to fall forward, swing your leg forward to provent your fall, again balancing your center of gravity over your feet. Now repeat the process from the other side, once again propelling your CG forward and start the process of falling forward again. Swing your leg forward once more arresting your fall and regain your balance. Do that repetitively, and you are walking. Again how hard can it be?
Well apparently, it is actually pretty darn hard. Scientist and engineers have been trying for a long time to create robots to help ease the work load of humans, and teaching them to walk has been a daunting challenge. Great progress is being made and someday I’m sure we will refine the software to approach the skill of a two-year-old. Take a look at the incredible progress some scientists from Boston Dynamics are having developing ATLAS, the walking robot.
Pretty incredible. You can almost see ATLAS falling forward as it makes forward progress on its journey. (I also hope that ATLAS has a good sense of humor, and is programed to forgive the guy in the video with the stick).
And that brings us to our leadership thought of the day. As leaders we need to lead in such a way that those we are responsible to direct learn the art of falling forward. We need to teach this when mistakes and errors occur, and we need to demonstrate this ability when we ourselves make mistakes and blunders. As leaders, we need to learn the art and skill of always falling forward and sharing that wisdom with our teams.
As for me, I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but it’s been a while now since I’ve come to believe that I am not perfect. In truth I’ve always known that to be the case, and I have many a memory of getting thumped in the back of the head for my screw ups while growing up to prove it. Even though I knew deeply that I was incapable of perfection, examining my approach to life and to leadership, in retrospect I really didn’t live my life that way. It seems that I always looked at a failure as the ultimate evil in life and so I took great efforts to plan, prepare and execute work with extreme attention to detail and try to leave no stone unturned in the execution of my projects and programs. If I was asked to rate the intensity of emotional impact between winning and losing, and was asked to compare the euphoria of success to the agony of defeat, the later would out score the former five to one. Said another way, as happy as winning would make me, the awful feelings associated with a defeat were far keener, more intense and much longer lasting. While this approach to life may have helped me obtain some of the successes I’ve had, it was also the source of many sorrows and difficulties, and in the long run, is unsustainable.
Maybe it comes with age and experience, but today I am able to take some of the sting and embarrassment out of falling short on certain efforts being comforted by the fact that I really cannot, “win them all”. I am an imperfect human being and as such, I am bound by nature and natures laws to error and come up short time and again. Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t like losing one iota, but at least I’ve been able to develop a leadership philosophy more along the lines of, “Falling Forward”. I do believe that if a mistake is not fatal, it is at least a golden opportunity to learn, and to grow. When we look at our failings and shortcomings through the leadership lens of life-long learning and continuous improvement we are able to make advances that would probably have eluded us any other way. Falling forward is the basis of growing wiser and stronger and helps us grow as a person and as a leader.
In my library I have several biographies and autobiographies of great leaders. I’ve noticed one common thread in each of their lives, that along the way they all made tremendous mistakes and suffered difficult failures in their lives. Leaders such as Presidents Lincoln, Roosevelt and Truman, Admirals Halsey and Nimitz and Generals Powell and Grant all admitted to significant failures in their lives and in their leadership. There are books written about these great leaders because they all Fell Forward and used these failures to learn from, to grow from and to never repeat.
Obviously this LToD is not a hall pass to go ahead and make flippant mistakes. It is still incumbent on us as leaders to carefully plan, prepare, train and equip for the successful execution of the missions entrusted to us. There is nothing better than winning, and in some circumstances, there is no other option. But when setbacks are encountered and errors in judgment or direction occur, may we capitalize on the learning opportunity and grow in wisdom and strength from the experience. Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” Perhaps he was on to a leadership truth too.
Stay Strong,
Terry
