Authors Dan Gregory and Kieran Flanagan reveal why fearlessness and failure tend to go hand in hand.
Authors Dan Gregory and Kieran Flanagan reveal why fearlessness and failure tend to go hand in hand.
In their book Selfish, Scared & Stupid, Dan Gregory and Kieran Flanagan reveal how being fearless – while idealised to a great extent – can lead to sloppy mistakes and poor decisions:
In truth, we love to look at the adventurous road, but mostly from the comfort of the safe path. But is this such a bad thing? Can fear be a factor in achievement? And is the favouring of heroism and persistence over contrary data and good judgment actually a formula for success or simply a way to have stories told about you in the past tense?
As is the case with many such questions, it kind of depends.
Fear is one of the reasons we survived
Fear, it turns out, is actually quite a useful emotion when it is appropriately applied. An overly curious nature mixed with naivety and overconfidence can be a recipe for disaster. Sending a canary into a mine to test for the presence of gas, while cruel, is actually a pretty savvy thing to do. In this case, fear not only ensures the survival of many miners, it also increases the chances of eventual success while reducing costs – miners are rather more expensive than songbirds.
Where fear can undermine leadership is when it becomes paralysing, when judgment is replaced by constant evaluation and data-seeking. The truth is, in any decision we make we never have the complete picture or enough information. This is, it turns out, why good judgment is so critical to good leadership.
Fear can be an aide to judgment
One of the things that particularly defines leadership is a willingness and ability to make decisions and back them. What this really means is embracing ownership of the results.
One of the burdens of leadership is that when you do achieve a success, it’s your team who won, but should failure be the outcome, you lost.
One of the criticisms we often make of strategic business plans is that the margins allowed for error are so slim. In other words, success is only guaranteed if everything goes exactly according to plan. Of course, this is statistically unlikely, and a far better approach is to stack the odds of success in your favour by implementing systems and processes that allow for success, even on those days when not everything goes as it should.
Learn to see fear as a lever for positive change
If we accept that fear has a lot of downsides, how can we turn this around and use fear as an asset in achieving positive change in order to generate the behavioural change we so desire? How can we generate an opposite fear, one that is linked to not changing?
The long and short of it is that reframing fear as an asset may not only remove impediments to performance but can actually serve to heighten and lift it. Fear (and its close cousin, stress) are suffering from some bad PR and really need some rebranding. We all need reminding that sometimes fear has been the good guy, and it has certainly been a considerable asset in the armoury of social change.
Rebalance the fear
This is perhaps the most important facet. We are not advocating that you ignore your fears or throw yourself at them as part of a mid-life extreme-sport crisis, nor are we suggesting that they are all irrational and imaginary. What we are suggesting is that they can be useful for driving change and shifting behaviour, and that this relies on shifting the balance of the fear equation from one side to the other.
For instance, if you are afraid to go for a jog because you’re looking a little wobbly around the middle (after a few too many ice creams) and are scared that people might laugh at ‘the fat guy in tight-fitting exercise gear’, that’s one side of the fear ledger. But if a chainsaw-wielding madman were storming through your house, you would not only jog but hurdle, parkour, long-jump and sprint, all while dialling for the emergency services. (And if anyone did choose to criticise you at this juncture, you would happily use them as an obstacle to slow down the chainsaw wielding maniac.)
The trick is to see fear – when appropriate – as a useful tool of leadership rather than something to avoid.
Author, educator and corporate coach, Keiran Flanagan is the chief creative officer at The Impossible Institute, while Dan Gregory is a regular on the ABC's Gruen Planet and is president and CEO of The Impossible Institute -- an innovation and engagement think-tank.
In their book Selfish, Scared & Stupid, Dan Gregory and Kieran Flanagan reveal how being fearless – while idealised to a great extent – can lead to sloppy mistakes and poor decisions:
In truth, we love to look at the adventurous road, but mostly from the comfort of the safe path. But is this such a bad thing? Can fear be a factor in achievement? And is the favouring of heroism and persistence over contrary data and good judgment actually a formula for success or simply a way to have stories told about you in the past tense?
As is the case with many such questions, it kind of depends.
Fear is one of the reasons we survived
Fear, it turns out, is actually quite a useful emotion when it is appropriately applied. An overly curious nature mixed with naivety and overconfidence can be a recipe for disaster. Sending a canary into a mine to test for the presence of gas, while cruel, is actually a pretty savvy thing to do. In this case, fear not only ensures the survival of many miners, it also increases the chances of eventual success while reducing costs – miners are rather more expensive than songbirds.
Where fear can undermine leadership is when it becomes paralysing, when judgment is replaced by constant evaluation and data-seeking. The truth is, in any decision we make we never have the complete picture or enough information. This is, it turns out, why good judgment is so critical to good leadership.
Fear can be an aide to judgment
One of the things that particularly defines leadership is a willingness and ability to make decisions and back them. What this really means is embracing ownership of the results.
One of the burdens of leadership is that when you do achieve a success, it’s your team who won, but should failure be the outcome, you lost.
One of the criticisms we often make of strategic business plans is that the margins allowed for error are so slim. In other words, success is only guaranteed if everything goes exactly according to plan. Of course, this is statistically unlikely, and a far better approach is to stack the odds of success in your favour by implementing systems and processes that allow for success, even on those days when not everything goes as it should.
Learn to see fear as a lever for positive change
If we accept that fear has a lot of downsides, how can we turn this around and use fear as an asset in achieving positive change in order to generate the behavioural change we so desire? How can we generate an opposite fear, one that is linked to not changing?
The long and short of it is that reframing fear as an asset may not only remove impediments to performance but can actually serve to heighten and lift it. Fear (and its close cousin, stress) are suffering from some bad PR and really need some rebranding. We all need reminding that sometimes fear has been the good guy, and it has certainly been a considerable asset in the armoury of social change.
Rebalance the fear
This is perhaps the most important facet. We are not advocating that you ignore your fears or throw yourself at them as part of a mid-life extreme-sport crisis, nor are we suggesting that they are all irrational and imaginary. What we are suggesting is that they can be useful for driving change and shifting behaviour, and that this relies on shifting the balance of the fear equation from one side to the other.
For instance, if you are afraid to go for a jog because you’re looking a little wobbly around the middle (after a few too many ice creams) and are scared that people might laugh at ‘the fat guy in tight-fitting exercise gear’, that’s one side of the fear ledger. But if a chainsaw-wielding madman were storming through your house, you would not only jog but hurdle, parkour, long-jump and sprint, all while dialling for the emergency services. (And if anyone did choose to criticise you at this juncture, you would happily use them as an obstacle to slow down the chainsaw wielding maniac.)
The trick is to see fear – when appropriate – as a useful tool of leadership rather than something to avoid.
Author, educator and corporate coach, Keiran Flanagan is the chief creative officer at The Impossible Institute, while Dan Gregory is a regular on the ABC's Gruen Planet and is president and CEO of The Impossible Institute -- an innovation and engagement think-tank.
