What I Learned From a Month of Failure

Through TKS (The Knowledge Society) I got the opportunity to participate in a PIE challenge for Shell. What does that mean you may be asking? At the most basic level, we had a month to identify a problem in the energy industry that is incentivized by economics, that Shell faces, then come up with a strategy to fix it. (PIE stands for Problems Incentivized by Economics)

Oh boy did I fail a lot during this month. In this article I want to go over the 3 main mistakes that I made, that caused my teammate and I to scramble in the last few days to put something together, where even calling it done would be a stretch. If you want to see our final recommendation deck you can find it here!

Let’s go through these one at a time.

Mistake #1: Lack of Self-Accountability.

During this month-long challenge, there are a lot of things that I could have done that would have greatly impacted the outcome of our recommendation. The reason I didn’t do those things was due to a lack of self-accountability.

What do I mean by self-accountability?

When I set a goal for the day or week I need to be able to complete that goal, and when you are by yourself, and you don’t set a consequence for not completing that goal, there’s no reason to push for it.

My main mistake during this month is that I didn’t directly message my teammate what my goals for the day were, and I never set a consequence in case I don’t complete those goals.

In my opinion, there are 3 things you can do to superpower your productivity. Set a goal, tell someone about that goal, and set a consequence in case you don’t complete the goal. I’ll give you an example.

This week, I’ve made it my personal challenge to write and publish 7 articles by the end of the week (I set a goal). I then told one of my close friends about the goal, so I can keep them updated throughout the week (I told someone about the goal). By the end of the week (Sunday at 11:59 PM) if I haven’t published 7 articles, I’m buying that same friend lunch the next day (I set a consequence). This is still day one of the challenge, and this article is the first one I’m writing this week, but I also have a past example that worked really well.

Two months ago I did a week-long crypto-currency build sprint, in 1 week I wanted to write 4 articles, record 3 videos, and build 3 projects. And that’s exactly what I did. But if I hadn’t told anyone about the goal, and didn’t set a consequence of buying my friend a smoothy, I don’t think I would have even gotten close to it.

In the Shell challenge, my day-to-day goals were constantly changing because of our limited time. Where this failed is that I told my teammate what those goals were, but they were never written down anywhere. And if I failed to complete them, the only consequence is that progress moved slower. For some reason, that wasn’t enough of an incentive for me to realize when my goals weren’t being completed.

In retrospect, where this was most apparent was during one week, my teammate was busy and I had to keep progress going. For 1 week, I felt as though I was advancing, but when he came back and I had to catch him up on what I had done during the week, it took me less than 5 minutes.

Because I wasn’t writing down what I wanted to finish, and because I didn’t reach out to anyone to keep me accountable, I had entered this illusion of progress. In reality, I was barely moving forwards.

Mistake #2: No Sense of Urgency (Until The Last Few Days)

My second fatal mistake was my lack of perception of time. A month sounds like a lot of time to find a problem, and come up with a solution, you don’t even have to implement it. It sounds like a lot of time until you realize just how difficult it is.

The hardest part about this challenge is finding which problem you want to solve. That sounds kind of dumb at first because companies like Shell face thousands of problems, but there are a lot of variables to take into account. One is how much money the problem costs Shell, another is how much time it would take to fix, another is how many resources are already being put towards solving it, etc…

In the beginning of the challenge, you go through this phase of identifying problems Shell faces, breaking them down to their root causes, and then formulating them into problem statements.

What do we do after? We kill problem statements. We want to find as many problems as possible, write them into problem statements, and then filter through them.

You want to spend at least the first two weeks finding the right problem statement because you’re spending the rest of your time solving it. If your problem doesn’t make sense, then you’ll have a rough time solving it.

The main reason why I didn’t feel a sense of urgency for most of the challenge, is that I failed to create a long-term timeline to overview the entire month. I made a few weekly timelines, and even daily timelines, but never a full overview of the month.

This simple lapse in action caused us to take a bit more than 3 weeks to settle on a problem, and we only started working on our slide deck 3 days before the submission deadline.

Having a clear timeline that outlines the entire month and the specific milestones you need to hit to stay on track is an incredibly valuable tool. Now that I’ve done a challenge without a timeline, I can say with absolute confidence that it is one of the most important tools to create at the beginning of the month.

Having a timeline that breaks down the overall goal of the month into sub, weekly milestones creates a sense of urgency to reach those milestones. Having a sense of urgency in such a limited timeframe will determine your success.

Mistake #3: Staying in The Comfort Zone

And finally the third mistake I will outline in this article is the fact I stayed in my comfort zone for most of the challenge, this caused a few sub-problems.

The first problem is that by staying in my comfort zone, it took me a lot longer to get to do some of the important things. Like reaching out to people. I had done one wave of reachouts where I sent a message to everyone I could find that I thought could help us, and then didn’t do it again until the last week of the challenge. By that time it’s too late.

Another aspect that comes with staying in my comfort zone was during my teammate’s and I’s daily syncs. Every day we had a call to check on how the day went, and plan the next day. They didn’t quite go exactly like that.

We had our daily calls but often skipped right past the part of checking in on how the day went. Why? Because it’s really uncomfortable to look back at the day and address a lack of progress. What is instead much more fun to do, is plan out the next day, without truly checking in on the other teammate.

We did this for a while, we only truly caught on to what we were subconsciously doing by the start of the last week. This slowed us down significantly.

Not only because it’s tough to plan out the next day without really knowing what’s been done, but also because things would take longer than they should have since there was no consequence for not having it done.

There’s a simple fix for this. Write down goals on a daily basis, send them to your teammate, and at the beginning of the meeting go through each goal you didn’t finish and ask yourself why that is. You’ll be able to identify a pattern and then remove that blocker.

For example, this article has taken me multiple days to write, why? I kept getting distracted by other things on my computer. I identified this pattern, closed all my tabs and other applications, unplugged my mouse, got an external keyboard, and now my laptop is across the room from me, but I am still typing this out.

If we did this on a daily basis during this challenge I can say for certain that our final recommendation would have been 10x better.

After a month of failure, I’ve learned a lot. These are just three of the most important things I’ve learned, but there are a lot of other smaller tidbits of information that aren’t as broad. But I’ll hold those for another time.

If you enjoyed reading this article, consider subscribing to my medium account! I’ll be publishing a few more articles in the coming days (from March 15th). Hope to see you there! 👋