Why Do My Failures Help My Teammates?

I believe DelightRoom has solid growth momentum because our members have strong survival skills and a capacity for growth. So, how does DelightRoom help its members grow?

At DelightRoom, we have several mechanisms in place to help our members grow. Today, I’d like to talk about one of them: "Dangnapae" (My Failure for You).

For a small organization like DelightRoom, individual growth ultimately heavily impacts the organization's growth. So, how do individuals grow? Typically, individuals plant the seeds for growth through past experiences, using some form of retrospective.

Past experiences can largely be divided into successes and failures. Which one has a greater impact on individual growth? Does success drive more growth, or does failure?

Thinking of the saying "Failure is the mother of success," I sometimes wonder if failures contribute more to greater growth. I'm also curious about how the successes and failures of the people around us affect our own growth.

A study investigated what contributed to the growth of surgical skills among cardiac surgeons with over 10 years of experience. This research provided some interesting insights into individual growth. For context, the surgeons in the study had performed nearly 6,500 heart surgeries combined.

Which drives growth more: past failures or successes?

The core questions of the study were these two:

• Does my failure help my success? Does someone else's failure help my success?

• Does my success help my success? Does someone else's success help my success?

The main findings of the study were as follows:

• My "success" helps my "success" experience.

• Someone else's "failure" helps my "success" experience.

To put it simply,

You could say that we achieve our own growth by looking at our own successful experiences and the mistakes of others. This seems somewhat obvious, but it feels like something is missing... Surely, I learn a lot from my own failures through retrospectives as well...

According to the study, to gain learnings from past experiences, you must be able to view those experiences objectively and dive deep into them.

However, people naturally have a cognitive bias (attribution error) that makes it difficult to objectively deep dive into their own failures. In other words, it's psychologically difficult to find the cause of the failure within ourselves.

Still, since other people's failures help my growth, it would be great if I shared my own failure cases for the sake of others' growth. This is where we get the hint for Dangnapae.

How can we actually put this into practice?

Set success criteria for tasks and sync on expectations before working

• Usually, the person who defined the problem sets the success criteria and syncs with teammates.

Analyze the causes of confirmed failures and take time to reflect

• You can reflect through team sprint retrospectives or quarterly retrospectives.

• Instead of team meetings, you can also take time to reflect during 1:1s with your team lead.

After analyzing, share the failure experience with teammates

• Share it through a 1:1 with a teammate you feel psychologically close to.

• Make it possible to share through formal team activities.

Real-world examples

In fact, during a learning-sharing session at a company-wide town hall, I once shared the lessons I learned from a failure case with all members. At the time, I also introduced the research that served as its background. And that was when I officially named it "Dangnapae (My Failure for You)."

Since then, Dangnapae has been conducted in various formats like the ones below.

Writing articles

This is a public Dangnapae that started with the mindset, "The learnings we gained from our blunders will be helpful to other startups too." At DelightRoom, we were already pretty good at sharing our learnings through blogging.

As part of that, we started making it easier to share learnings from failures as well.

The key here isn't just the failure itself, but making sure to capture the learnings gained from it as the core message.

Hot Reviews

This is currently being done in the engineering team.

For the hotfixes that came out during the last release cycle, the issue owner for each platform summarizes their learnings from the failure in the following format for the very last one.

• Summarizing the problem from the user's perspective

• Cause

• Solution

• Preventative measures

Town hall

Every week, during our company-wide learning sharing sessions, we take about 5 to 10 minutes to present and summarize our past failure experiences and the learnings we gained. These presentations are voluntary, and members can freely format and share the lessons learned from their failures.

Conclusion

When you actually do Dangnapae, there are quite a lot of times when we don't know whether the work we did was successful or not. In fact, because we don't know, there are cases where we spend more time agonizing over it.

That's why, simply by setting success criteria, there are times when we can gain learnings much faster afterward.

Depending on the team's work maturity, whether to design tasks to achieve many small wins or to accomplish just a few challenging goals is also an interesting thing to ponder.

And above all, prior to sharing failures, building psychological safety within the team is paramount, and I think it's crucial for team leads to set an example here. It helps everyone realize that team leads are human too and can also experience failure.

Ultimately, because Dangnapae promotes not only my own growth but also the growth of my teammates, it can accelerate the organization's growth.