The travel photographer Chris Burkard wasn’t expecting to capture a volcanic eruption in real time on film.
Burkard, though, whose 3.7 million followers on Instagram can attest, has a knack for finding himself in the right place at the right time.
But Nature, as it so often does, had other plans. There to bike and backpack his way through the country and maybe take some great photos along the way, Burkard happened upon the eruption, took his camera out and captured the images you see here.
Burkard’s photos and video are surreal, but it’s the way that he reflects on his experience that gives us clues about how we can do the same for ourselves and our teams, using a design thinking strategy that the most effective teams and people make habitual.
"Sometimes a peak moment won't slap you in the face or excite you right away," Burkard explains. "You realize it later. It sort of dawns on you. I like to give myself the time and patience to recognize these moments."
But why does this pausing to slow down, experience, and reflect on these moments work?
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If you've ever asked someone for advice, I'd place a decent wager the adage of learning from your failures has come up.
Maybe it was about how we need to do things that cause us to fail, as Chief Justice John Roberts wished the graduation class in his 2017 commencement speech. Or maybe it was more about how we need to be boldly unafraid of failure in order to live our fullest lives, like Denzel Washington explained in his 2014 commencement address.
Failure, sure, is a great teacher. The problem is we're not very good students.
Professors Ayelet Fishbach and Lauren Eskreis have studied precisely this concept. And what they found has implications for how we learn, both individually and organizationally, from our past experiences.
The researchers found that failure actually does quite the opposite of helping us learn. In fact, it might prevent it.
Why? They explain, "When we fail, we tune out. To avoid feeling bad about ourselves, we stop paying attention. As a result, we don't learn from the experience."
Magnifying mistakes, they theorized, could actually have adverse impacts on helping others learn. Instead, they argued for something different: spotlight success.
In other words, reflect on peak experiences that were successful. Determine what conditions within your control led to them, codify those, and then aim to replicate.
For Burkard in Iceland, repeating a volcanic eruption wasn't possible. Reminding himself of the mindset to soak those moments in and appreciate them helped underscore his passion for the work. This led him to feeling a deep sense of gratitude for his work as a photographer.
What if we, as leaders, could be more intentional about helping our people learn from their successes and “peak experiences” as much as their failures? What impact might it have on a person's sense of self worth, a team's identity, and your own sense of self-efficacy as a leader?
My guess is a profound one.
Interested in trying? Here's how.
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Bill Burnett and Dave Evans of the Stanford University design educators and founders of the Standard d.school call this exercise: "Mining the Mountaintop." In this exercise, they suggest reflecting on your peak experiences by considering where you were particularly successful, what led to that success, and what you can learn from it for the future.
This helps individuals not only learn what they did to contribute to those successes but also leaves people feeling motivated to repeat them.
Here is a set of questions I've used with teams to ”mine the mountaintops” of peak experiences in order to accelerate learning and development:
1) Tell me about a time when you believe this team was particularly successful.
2) What did you do to contribute to that success? What did other members of the team do?
3) What about how we worked with one another contributed to that success? What were some of the impacts you saw?
4) What transferable lessons do you have about how we could replicate this success as a team?
Mistakes, unlike our peak experiences, slap us in the face. We're already paying attention to them.
It's the successes, the mountaintops we should mine, that Burkard reminds us to slow down and appreciate.
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