Figure out how to move on when something doesn’t work.
We make a lot of decisions during the design, planning, and delivery of our work. Each decision has the potential to go wrong - to become a failure or mistake. We can’t avoid making mistakes. However, when we make them it’s important to
- Acknowledge them.
- Learn from them.
- Try not to repeat them.
How we handle failure impact our relationships with our colleagues, event organizers, and audience members. Failure is an opportunity to build and rebuild trust, as well as to improve the quality of relevance of your content for your learners.
We can’t escape failure, but we can account for it and move on from it in constructive ways.
Plan for failure, but don’t plan to fail.
Some failures will be bad enough on their own that we have to repair trust after making them. However, every time we fail to acknowledge and take responsibility for a mistake, we break trust regardless of the nature of our failure. Expect to fail, and expect yourself to acknowledge your failures. Apologize and ask for input about what to do next or what to do next time you facilitate work using similar content.
Of course, some failures are easy to fix. If you’re in the middle of a workshop and you realize you didn’t budget in time for a break or forgot something at home, generally you can find time for a quick stretch or improvise what you need from materials you have on-hand. The more experience you collect as a facilitator, the less prone you’ll be to committing little errors like these.
You’ll still make plenty of sizeable mistakes as you go, though. Maybe you planned too few activities to fill your class, session, or workshop, or maybe you planned too many and never got to cover everything you promised to deliver. These are the kinds of mistakes you have to expect yourself to learn from and to address between events by iterating on your processes and products.
So long as you act in good-faith and design with input from colleagues and potential audience members in mind, it’s not likely that you’ll fail catastrophically enough to derail an entire event or completely break trust with an entire community. If you approach facilitation as a trust-building process and practice due diligence in serving your learners’ needs, you’ll be able to recover and learn from the small-to-medium kinds of mistakes you should expect to make from time to time. Focus on improving your work by avoiding mistakes you’ve made in the past.
Ultimately, there are mistakes you can anticipate and mistakes you can’t.
You can anticipate some mistakes because you’ve made them before or because you’re proofing your work against input from colleagues, event organizers, and potential audience members. If you can anticipate a mistake or the possibility of failure, plan accordingly. Fix your mistake before you facilitate an event, or have a backup plan ready in case you need to punt an activity mid-session.
Avoid shortcuts like reusing an old activity that was so-so because you don’t have time to tailor it for your audience. If you know you need more time, acknowledge that, say so, and budget it into your process between events. Likewise, keep revising and improving the materials you use and share - don’t rely on face-to-face facilitation to smooth over rough spots in content you’re inviting others to use and build from after an event.
Finally, accept that there are failures and mistakes that you can’t anticipate or plan for ahead of time. At some point, failure will surprise you. Follow the same basic protocol whenever you miscalculate: acknowledge your failure and take responsibility for it, learn from it, and add it to the list of mistakes you’ll do your best not to repeat.
Use this template and the examples on it to draft scripts of your own that you can rehearse in case of failure. Knowing that you have something constructive to say when things go wrong can help you approach the unknowns of facilitation with greater adaptability, comfort, and responsiveness to your learners’ needs.
If you only rehearse for success, you’ll be lost when you fail.