REVERSING FAILURE DOES NOT EQUAL EXPERTISE

“You cannot learn very much about excellence from studying failure. Of all the infinite number of ways to perform a certain task, most of them are wrong. There are only a few right ways. Excellence is not the opposite of failure. It is just different. It has its own configuration.” First, Break all the Rules. Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.

This quotation reflects the very premise which we use in NLP. Namely, that when you want to develop models of excellence, it will do you no good to study what is broken, flawed, or dysfunctional. Bandler compared that approach to visiting a junkyard and studying broken and crashed cars if your outcome is to design and build the next generation of new cars. If you study the cars in a junkyard and how they broke down, or were destroyed, and then try to reverse what went wrong, that is not likely to enable you to create an excellent car. The same is true of dysfunctional families, individuals, and organizations —studying them will not give you the pathway to excellence.

Buckingham and Coffman suggest that there’s not that much we can learn about excellence from failure because there’s so many ways to fail, and only a few ways to succeed. To succeed at doing something with excellence, and developing expertise requires being willing to identify the required factors and then working with those variables in a focused way. The first key is to identify what’s necessary and sufficient. And those factors may be the ones especially missing in the junkyard.

What this means for you, if you want to pursue expertise, is that when you know the required factors, stop chasing options. For people who are option-oriented, this can be challenging and at first unpleasant. What happens when a person is always trying to find yet another way, another alternative, etc. to doing what you know are true and tested ways? You get distracted and lose the intensity of focus which you need to develop excellence in what you are doing.

The authors also say something else important about excellence, namely expertise has its own configuration. It has its own structure or form. Often that’s what is discovered and what creates a paradigm shift in a field. Someone thinks outside of the box and comes up with something that no one had ever thought of before. How do we find such

variables? This is where brainstorming comes in, reading outside of the field, asking, “What am I missing?” “What else could be there but is not?”

Excellence is almost never about fixing what has not worked or what barely worked. Excellence is not a remedial type of experience. Instead it is generative by nature and arises from thinking anew about an area, often re-thinking the assumptions and premises that have led to the previous failures. Not infrequently what goes wrong and causes failure goes to the fact that the previous actions were based on false premises.

When you study failure, you will mostly learn excellent ways to fail. You might also learn about the variables that make someting go wrong. At best, you will learn about the factors that need to be fixed or repaired. Ironically a great deal of “problem-solving” among individuals and in organizations is entirely problem-focused. It is directed to identifying and correcting the problem, or identifying the persons involved, it is remedial in nature. It is not focused on excellence—on a superior product, service, or methodology.

The solution to trying to study failure and then reverse it to identify excellence is to move away from a problem focus in the first place and adopt a solution focus. It is to focus on your desired outcome and what excellence mean in terms of that outcome. And that’s why we look to experts and Carl Rogers’ “fully functioning persons” as exemplars who we want to model.

For more Thinking Like a Modeler (2018) Deep Dive into Expertise (2022) https://www.neurosemantics.com/shop/page/8/ https://www.neurosemantics.com/products/