Last month I had the opportunity to hear Megan Oakleaf give the keynote address at the Kathleen A. Zar Symposium held at the University of Chicago (http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/crerar/zar/). Megan is an Assistant Professor at the iSchool at Syracuse University and, among other things, an expert in assessment. Her talk was fantastic! She is bright, articulate, funny, and truly passionate about what she does. Her work on assessment is brilliant, but one thing that stayed with me from her talk isn’t about assessment at all (or perhaps only tangentially so). She mentioned that as a new librarian at North Carolina State, she had the freedom to fail. Innovation was so important that librarians were actually encouraged to fail. What a concept!
Personally, I have always been afraid to fail. I admit that I haven’t pursued certain projects because I was afraid I couldn’t pull them off. They were too hard, too complicated, or I was afraid I wouldn’t get buy-in from students or colleagues or administrators. I found myself in that “but they’ve never done it that way here” mentality. I was new, so the more experienced colleagues knew better, right? But if my institution would encourage failure, give me and my colleagues the freedom to fail, to learn from our mistakes, and to move on, would I take that freedom? Would I actually be more innovative? I’d like to think so, but I also know the answer might be more complex than that. Fear of failure is pretty ingrained in most of us.
Andy over at Agnostic, Maybe has a great post on making mistakes. He mentions that “mistakes are the tuition we pay for our success.” I really like that idea. Everyone knows that we learn from our mistakes, but how many of us think about that when we undergo a new project or tackle a problem?
Does your institution encourage risk-taking and crazy ideas? How do they let you know that it’s okay to fail? And, perhaps more importantly, have you taken them up on it?
