Let’s start talking about our failures on Linked In

I’m sharing my story for four reasons:

i) to help me reflect and learn

ii) to share my lessons to help you

iii) to connect and learn alongside people who are interested in their own development

iv) to be honest and open about my experiences, good and bad (to lead by example)

I’ve been writing on Medium with these intentions since June 2018 and wanted to explore the value of writing about failure when talking about your work.

We all know we live in a society where facts are not as valued as they used to be — opinion often seems to win out over facts. We only need to look at the story of the eradication of measles and the risk of its return to the UK to see the dangers.

Society’s expectation of perfection and the pressures this places on all of us, not least our children, is also a challenge we all face at the moment.

From using LinkedIn more actively over the last couple of years, this seems to be true when discussing our work as well. I’ve certainly been guilty of sharing my ‘opinion’ and selectively talking about my success only. I’ve treated it as a marketing channel.

You might argue that LinkedIn’s purpose is to support people in marketing your business. I wouldn’t disagree but I believe it does have other goals.

As research for this article I tried to find how LinkedIn described its purpose.

The nearest I could find was a quote from its wikipedia page:

LinkedIn has become the de facto tool for professional networking

I looked up professional networking and found this a helpful description:

Networking is a deliberate activity to build, reinforce and maintain relationships of trust with other people to further your goals. Professional networking is simply networking focused on professional goals

So let’s assume your professional goal is to further your skills and knowledge…

How well do we use LinkedIn (and other communities) to further our skills and knowledge?

I accept that LinkedIn offers a variety of training. However, I want to focus on where our real learning takes place which is when we are doing our work. Training gives us theory when it is removed from the workplace and certainly when it is online.

So there is an opportunity for us to use LinkedIn/Medium/MeetUp to learn by talking honestly and openly about our work including trials and tribulations. And talking about our actual work ‘live’, not a sanitised case study after we’ve solved the problem. Learning takes place when we take the risk of sharing failures, frustrations and fears. This is what it means to be a human and we are rational, emotional and instinctive creatures, we do not make decisions based on purely rational analysis.

Unfortunately there are not enough conversations about the work on LinkedIn and too many abstract conversations about a favoured methodology or silver bullet.

Some positive examples are:

Mark Smith’s excellent blog on his journey to reform public services. He takes us through the journey of testing an alternative approach to people who have fallen behind in paying their council tax. He explores an idea that understanding their circumstances and finding an opportunity to help will produce a better result for the individual and the council.

John Mortimer has shared his experience of helping a team of managers address some critical problems over a week. I’m looking forward to similar content from John in the future.

One of the problems is commercial confidentiality. I try to keep my commentary anonymous and avoid commercially sensitive material. However, I do mention that Lloyds Banking Group is my main client at the moment. I believe that telling my story is positive for their brand and is aligned with the way of working and mindset that they are trying promote.

Hilary Simpson also engages in debate and questions accepted wisdom. This is important for our learning and development. There are lots of echo chambers where people just keep supporting the accepted view rather than thinking more deeply and questioning and challenging. Finding your crowd and sticking to them is NOT the route to learning. I am guilty of this too but try to avoid this bias.

Challenging BBC bias and irrelevance to many groups

Talking about how we can and should be working to be more effective, especially in the public sector

What are your experiences?