She tells an interesting story about her breakthrough moment — and it was just that, a moment — when she started down the road of becoming an expert. It happened on the day she decided to fall. She was getting on the lift at the base of a steep, sunlit ski bowl. She had just come down a twisted, mogul-ridden trail in top form, earning the admiration of a teenager who’d been trailing behind her. At the bottom, amidst words like “stoked” and “killer,” the teenager asked, “Do you ever fall?”
Getting on the lift, she realized that (1) the answer was no, and that (2) if the teenager had been a nephew or a cousin whom she felt invested in developing as a skier, she wouldn’t have wanted to admit that to him. Instead she would have pointed out that if you never fall, you aren’t pushing yourself and you aren’t improving as fast as you could be. Midway up the mountain she realized that she hardly ever fell, perhaps once every eight or ten days on skis, and even then it was usually at tangled moments when she wasn’t actually skiing that hard. She realized that if she wasn’t falling she probably wasn’t pushing herself to learn as hard as she could be. She had gotten lazy because she was so good.
When she got to the top of the mountain and skied off the chairlift, she knew what she needed to do. She set out to ski hard enough to fall, but she was intentional about how. She knew that there was one thing that she had been working on: pointing her shoulders face down the mountain, no matter how steep. She then set out to execute this skill even if that meant falling. She fell three times that first day. “I could feel myself trying to do exactly the things I was afraid of. I knew if I stuck with it I would conquer my fears.” She began skiing without fearing falling. Within a few weeks she was a different skier entirely.
In that single moment, she was able to embrace two important truths: first, failure is normal and not the indicator of a lack of skill; second, skiing right at the edge of mastery would make her better. She had to trust that exposing her weaknesses — risking ridicule and embarrassment — rather than trying to cover them up would be the driver of excellence. Compare our friend to a skier who just tries to ski the hardest runs as fast as he can. If he pushes himself to fall without encoding success, then he will fail miserably, likely leaning back too much on his skis and risking injury.
How do you build an organizational culture of fearless skiers willing to take thoughtful risks in order to improve — especially when the goal is to encode success? An organization has to help its people realize that failure rate and level of skill are independent variables; it has to help them feel comfortable exposing their weaknesses to their peers so they can help them improve; it has to make them feel trust and faith and even joy, not only to practice but to do so with others. The first step on that journey is to normalize error.