Flux, Failure and Risk
This article is part of our Mentor-Coach Reading List series. Join the mailing list to receive this and more.
SETTING THE SCENE
We face flux, change and difficult situations all the time. We may succeed or we may fail. It helps to both fail well and to learn from our success - to understand how we make decisions and our reasoning abilities. We can also learn from ‘risk-takers’ about why they do what they do, how they prepare, and how they’ve handled things going wrong.
Happy Reading and stay curious!
Here is more information about the Series 18 selection of books.
The Art of Risk (Simon & Schuster Australia, July 2023) by Dr Richard ‘Harry’ Harris, SC, OAM who is a joint 2019 Australian of the Year, is an anaesthetist and cave diver who played a crucial role in the Tham Luang cave rescue in northern Thailand. He talks with other ‘risk-takers’ about why they do what they do, how they prepare, and how they’ve handled things going wrong. Harry talks with people like climber Alex Honnold (of ‘Free Solo’), sailor Jessica Watson, mountaineer James Scott, film director and deep-sea diver James Cameron, amongst many less familiar world-beaters, each of whom has a fascinating story. We meet base-jumpers, drag-racers, snipers, surfers, people adventuring from the highest of skies to the deepest of oceans. Harry’s conversations give us insights into what motivates these people and why a life without risk is no life at all. He believes that by doing ‘the hard things’ in life you can push yourself a little further and become stronger, more courageous and resilient.
Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, August 2021) by April Rinne. Being adaptable and flexible have always been hallmarks of effective leadership and a fulfilling life. But in a world of so much—and faster-paced—change, and an ever-faster pace of change, flexibility and resilience can be stretched to their breaking points. The quest becomes how to find calm and lasting meaning in the midst of enduring chaos. A world in flux calls for a new mindset, one that treats constant change and uncertainty as a feature, not a bug. Whether readers are sizing up their career, reassessing their values, designing a product, building an organization, trying to inspire their colleagues, or simply showing up more fully in the world, enjoying a flux mindset and activating their flux superpowers will keep readers grounded even when the ground is too often shifting beneath them.
Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs (Watkins Publishing, February 2023) by Uri Levine. As the cofounder of Waze – the world's leading commuting and navigation app with more than 700 million users to date, and which Google acquired in 2013 for $1.15 billion – Levine is committed to spreading entrepreneurial thinking so that other founders, managers, and employees in the tech space can build their own highly valued companies. Levine offers an inside look at the creation and sale of Waze and his second unicorn, Moovit, revealing the formula that drove those companies to compete with industry veterans and giants alike.
Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure (MIT Press, April 2023) by Vaclav Smil. Filled with engaging examples and pragmatic approaches, this book is a sobering account of the folly that so often attends human ingenuity-and how we can, and must, better align our expectations with reality. Smil offers a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI. He reminds us that even after we go quite far along the invention-development-application trajectory, we may never get anything real to deploy. Or worse, even after we have succeeded by introducing an invention, its future may be marked by underperformance, disappointment, demise, or outright harm. Drawing on his vast breadth of scientific and historical knowledge, Smil explains the difference between invention and innovation. He then looks at three different types of inventions. 1. Inventions that failed to dominate as promised; 2. Inventions that turned disastrous and 3. Inventions we have long been promised. Finally, he offers a "wish list" of inventions that we most urgently need to confront the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century.
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (HarperCollins, June 2009) by Dan Ariely. When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're in control. We think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we? In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities. Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same types of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable - making us predictably irrational.
Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well (Atria Books, September 2023) by Amy Edmondson. We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well. Edmondson, an award-winning Harvard Business School professor, provides the framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely. Outlining the three archetypes of failure—basic, complex, and intelligent—this book showcases how to minimise unproductive failure while maximising what we gain from flubs of all stripes.
… AND HERE ARE A FEW RELEVANT ARTICLES TO EXPLORE
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