For us to be able to improve on the path of learning, there must be a way to gauge how much of it is happening already and where we aspire to be. Management 3.0’s framework called Celebration Grid offers just that and helps to compare people’s behaviour with the amount of learning gathered.
As you can see in the image above this post, the grid itself is divided into three columns: Mistakes, Experiments and Practices, and three rows: Success, Failure and Learning. As for the colour coding, green and red obviously mean success and failure respectively, grey is kind of neutral while yellow represents learning. Furthermore:
- Practices column is the most straight forward. If you do the right things in the right way, you are likely to be successful. However, even the best tried-and-tested practices can fail sometimes. As long as the team reflects on what happened, they will learn and avoid failure in the future.
- Mistakes column is an interesting place to be in. Generally speaking, mistakes tend to lead to failure but sometimes wrong things can eventually still lead to success. Unless we reflect on and try to understand our failures, there is little possibility that we will learn from them.
- Experiments column is my personal favorite. Experimenting means trying something new without knowing if the outcome will be a successful or not. Either you try and succeed or you try and fail. Irrespective of the result, you always will have maximum learning in this case.
How to use this tool? Take it to your teams and think about behaviour that can be put in each of the 6 sections, an example of which is shown below. Since Experiments column has the maximum learning, the more points your team has there – the better it gets! Running this exercise every week/month/quarter will give you an opportunity to measure and celebrate the amount of learning happening.
This content was originally published for my TechTuesday’s initiative on LinkedIn.
