Wild Blue Yonder on the Air - Ep. 22 - Dr. Lauren Mackenzie on the role of failure in teaching and learning. Published Dec. 8, 2022 By Dr. Lauren Mackenzie Wild Blue Yonder on the Air -- Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Air University, the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other US government agency. Dr. Megan Hennessey: Welcome to Wild Blue Yonder on the Air, Air University’s podcast. I am Dr. Megan Hennessey, Director of the Air University Teaching and Learning Center. Here today with my friend Dr. Lauren Mackenzie. Dr. Mackenzie is Professor of Cross-cultural Competence at Marine Corps University. So, Lauren, we're so happy to have you here at Air University, coming back home after a while. Well, tell us more about your connection to the Air Force before we dive into some questions. Dr. Lauren Mackenzie: Thanks Dr. Hennessey. Such a pleasure to see you again. Such a pleasure to be back. Yes, I was here for five years. I served as the AFCSE Associate Professor (at the time) of cross-cultural communication from 2009 to 2014. It was a great experience. I learned so much. It was a wonderful introduction to professional military education and also, I designed and developed a class for the Community College of the Air Force, a sort of introduction to cross-cultural communication, which was just some of the most rewarding work I've had a chance to do in my career. And again, surrounded by a great team, I really enjoyed it. But yeah, it's been quite some time since I've been back. It was so wonderful to walk around Air University and see the familiar faces and the walls and the offices that I used to spend so much time in. So, thanks for the warm welcome. Hennessey: Yes, of course. So, Lauren, you have a really interesting job title in the military education system: Professor of Cross-cultural Competence. What's your typical day like? Mackenzie: Well, I suppose in some ways it's like your average faculty member in any educational institution. I'm always thinking about ways that I can do a better job making my course content more relatable and more relevant for my students. So again, I think regardless of the content that you have expertise in or the content that you teach, there's always this hunger to do better at connecting with the students. But just to take it back a little bit to give our listeners a little bit of background. So, I was initially brought into Marine Corps University's CAOCL, which is the culture center, the Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning, in 2015. And one of my main jobs in that role was to connect CAOCL, which was a really large, thriving organization that had many different areas of emphasis. I was to be their connection to the university, so I was always, always working across many different learning levels, from Captain to Major to Lieutenant Colonel to, of course, the enlisted force and I really enjoyed that, that time in my life and in the five years that I got to spend at CAOCL and serving as part of that bridge between the culture center and the university. Unfortunately, in 2020, the Marine Corps divested itself of the Culture Center. And yeah, we're now down to a very small number of folks, mainly Major John Behrmann, who oversees the Center for Regional and Security Studies. With that being said, I've really had to redefine my role at Marine Corps University and to think about how I can maybe still do the same kind of work, but perhaps call it something different. So now as opposed to teaching classes throughout the academic year on, say, you know, introduction to culture or cross-cultural competence, now the classes that I design and often lead are called things like Leading Diverse Teams or Organizational Culture, or Critical and Creative Thinking. So again, they get at some of the same skill sets, some foundational underpinnings of relationship building and bridging diverse viewpoints, but maybe they're called something a little bit different. And so now my typical day is really trying to find, again, relevant and accessible ways to tie culture mindsets and skillsets into a bigger leadership capability. And so currently I am teaching full time in the Security Studies Department at the Command and Staff College. But that is, I am a substitute for a professor who left us over the summer. And so while they're hiring for her replacement, I'm filling in full-time and I love it. I love being in seminars with the students full-time. I love the connection you get with seeing the same students most days of the week throughout the semester, but at the same time, it's not lasting and I will go back to kind of teaching across the university and having touch points at the different colleges as opposed to really being strictly embedded into one. So that's really, yeah, what I'm working on right now still have a lot of areas of interest that I'm trying to pursue when I'm not teaching now. But as you know, when you are teaching full-time, it takes up a lot of your mental energy and space. Hennessey: Yes, it does. Mackenzie: So trying to find time for research has been a bit of a challenge, but one that I enjoy. Hennessey: Well, I think you are one of the most flexible and adaptable people in military education that I know. And you just explained why, because you work with so many different people at so many different levels. Content agnostic, many proficiencies, almost like a Teaching and Learning Center. But I also know that one of your research projects explores the experience of failure in teaching and learning. I'm wondering if there's a link there to how flexible that you are. Can you describe this project a little bit? Mackenzie: Yeah, sure. So, one of the things that I'm really interested in is helping students anticipate and navigate the complexities of difficult conversations and these difficult conversations are things that we often don't talk about, and so this idea of learning from failure has been one over the years and I'll quote Amy Edmondson, who's really well known for her work on psychological safety, but also who has written a great deal about learning from failure, and she often asks the question like how are we supposed to learn from failure if we won't even talk about it? And as I was reading those words, it really struck a chord with me because at the different educational institutions I've been part of, and I've probably taught full-time at 8 to 10 different civilian universities since I was a military spouse for many years. And then in PME, I've worked for the Army, the Air Force, the Marine Corps. I've never heard anybody talking about it. And then I had my own, of course, a failure, which we all do. It's, you know, it's been said that failure is simultaneously universal, unexpected, and unavoidable. I had many of my own. But one that stands out is when I was turned down for promotion several years ago and I had no idea who to turn to talk about that. I mean, of course you have your best friend. You have your spouse. But it's like, has no one besides me ever been turned down for a promotion? That's what I felt like, because I've never heard anyone talk about it or write about it. And so, I was really trying to process that. And it did feel like a tremendous failure, not only because I let myself down, but because it was the humiliation of how many people knew that I had been turned down for promotion. That's the thing about how public it is. And so that's sort of in the back of my mind and then a year or two later I think I had the great number, where I had like my 25th journal article rejected, and I had a particularly harsh set of reviewer critiques, and I was feeling like wow maybe I’m not meant for this work, this is so hard. And then on top of that, I let a student down that I was mentoring sort of through the IRB process. He was trying to do surveys overseas and I didn't help him anticipate how difficult that would be, and so I felt like there was a mentoring failure there. And then, you know, I had some personal failures. All this to say, I felt like it was the perfect storm of failures in my own life. And if you do believe in this assumption, that research is “me-search,” right? I really wanted to learn for myself how to navigate these failures and how to learn from them. And then I wanted to be able to help my students, right? Because how can we help our students if we can't help ourselves? And so that's really how it began. And one day I'm driving to work and I'm listening to a podcast. It's one of my favorites. It's called Rough Translation and they had a podcast episode called “When Failure is a Four-letter Word.” And it was about all these different cultural interpretations surrounding failure. You know how inappropriate it can feel to talk about it? How in failure, when you feel you don't just fail yourself, you fail your family and those around you. And it just struck a chord with me, like, yes, we need to start talking about this. And I went to my good friend Kerry Fosher, who also works at Marine Corps University, and she agreed, we need to start talking about this. So, this is a little bit of the background that led to a faculty development session back when all these were in person. Now at MCU they are all virtual. It wasn't that well attended. You know, maybe we got 12 to 15, but the best part of that process was going to other faculty members and staff and asking will you come on this panel and talk about your own failures? And the idea is that if we can get more sort of seasoned folks to talk about their failures, perhaps it will give more junior faculty or junior staff, feel permission and feel like it's accessible and something that they can talk about, too. Because it's just, it just is. It's like what David Livermore says about diversity. It just is the same with failure. I mean, like you're just… It's what makes us human, I suppose. And so again, I was just looking for the tools to make this accessible and to maybe nest it under a leadership capability. And so, then I was so grateful that the director at the time of the Marine Corps War College, Col Blair Sokol, very progressive and very willing to let me take a risk. And he allowed me to pilot a course on learning from failure several years ago at the War College with thirty ‘05 and ‘06 level military students. They were fantastic and I've been doing it now, I think this is my 4th year. And so, I just, I really believe in the value of it. So not just from the faculty development standpoint, not just from the classroom standpoint, but also, you know, I've begun to weave it in. So as the Faculty Council chair at MCU, I get to sit in on all the promotion committees and ask questions. And I've actually worked in failure questions when we question the candidates who are up for promotion because, again, we all have access to these highlight reels of people’s successes and their careers, right? They're very curated. They're available instantaneously on LinkedIn and you know we're all very, I suppose, well of course, well-practiced in singing our own praises, and that's how, that's the game we have to play to get promoted. But at the same time we wouldn't get those, or have those successes without the failures along the way, and so my question is like why are those omitted from the narrative on teaching and learning and research? So I've now worked that into my questions when candidates go up for promotion and I think that's kind of a really fun area to discuss and then again just to make it normal. I think that's been one of my goals, because, again, failure forces revision. Failure forces us to sometimes acknowledge things we don't want to acknowledge about ourselves, but at the same time, to relate better to our colleagues, to relate better to our students, and to really think about, you know, when some of the foundations of our beliefs about teaching, learning, research, mentoring are shaken, you know, often we don't have any other choice other than to rebuild. And sometimes we rebuild in ways we otherwise never would have thought of had that failure not occurred. And so again, that's just one of my goals when I get in front of faculty, when I get in front of students, and talk about the value of this, because often people are like what are you doing talking about failure? What is this? And so that's a little bit of some of the rationale that I use for its value in the teaching and learning context. Hennessey: I'm so blown away in thinking that, in an oxymoronic way, your greatest success, or one of your great successes in PME has turned out to be on failure. Mackenzie: On failure. I know it’s a great contradiction. I know some of my other research areas are like relationship repair, on apology, and more recently end of life communication. So, when people say like, look at this, you know, talk about life of the party, right? So, you research apology, death, and failure. You know, not necessarily the most uplifting topics. Hennessey: And very counter to your personality. Mackenzie: Yeah, I guess I just want to learn. I want to be able to teach my kids about this. I don't want my work just to be constrained to the classroom or to journals that nobody reads, to be honest, you know, I want to be able to translate this and transfer this in my life with friends, with colleagues, with family. Now, of course the flip side of that, and Megan, I know I am, I'm preaching to the choir here. One of the big challenges of teaching something like culture, communication, learning from failure, is you don't just have to teach it, you have to live it. It's not like you're teaching mathematical equations and they go up on the board and you're not expected to embody it. With this kind of material, conflict management, learning from failure, culture and communication, I mean students and the people in your orbit, in your life, expect you to also embody it and be it and live the thing that you are researching and teaching and that's easier said than done. I'll tell you. It is a lot easier to write about it and to examine other peoples’ failures and apologies and end of life. But then when you turn the camera on yourself, it's definitely a hard look. Hennessey: It takes some humility and vulnerability. Mackenzie: Totally. And again, being in a position, and I'll acknowledge this, that perhaps if I was a young, and I'm not young, young Assistant Professor, I would not be as emboldened to take these kind of chances or to introduce these kinds of courses into our curriculum. I think it's a great honor and one that I am grateful for every day; to be in a position where I feel my job is somewhat stable and I feel I'm at a position in my career where I don't care if I don't go up any higher. I'm where I'd like to be. So that's an awesome place to be when you want to experiment and you want to have those hard conversations. Again, going back to this idea of the paradox, right, we need the successes and the highlight reels and the books and the great student evals to promote. But again, at the same time, those don't happen without failures, and actually the failures make those successes and those accomplishments that much more rich and meaningful. But again, the narrative on failure seems to be omitted. And again, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution to that. I mean, we could never shield ourselves from failure, and I would never want that. But I think we do have some say in the narratives that we build around it. And that's something that I'm trying to help shape at MCU and then maybe even beyond now. I mean, I'm so glad that you invited me to be on this podcast and talking. Hennessey: As are all of our listeners. Mackenzie: Across PME and different fields of study. Hennessey: Well, you mentioned that you ask the faculty going up for promotion at Marine Corps University about their failures. When they give you an answer, how do you parse that? Analyze it? What does it tell you about them as an educator? Mackenzie: You know, I've only heard maybe 3 responses in this regard. It's just something I've started to do last year. And they've been so rich and substantive and candid in a way that I didn't expect. I wondered if they were going to kind of give me a quasi-failure, one that's sort of safe, that still makes them look very good in the end, but no. They were real. These were failures. I mean, again, failure is subjective and again, something to me that might sound like a setback to you might feel like a failure. So, I mean, who am I to say, but these folks that went up for promotion, when they talked about their failures like they were real, and they were in a way heartbreaking, and I can imagine the echo of some of these words in these faculty members minds that some of the things students had said that, yeah, it's not easy to deal with it. But I think they again made our conversation so rich, and they signaled to me that these faculty members have that growth mindset that they always want to learn and grow. And we know that growth and comfort don't go hand in hand. So, if you're always comfortable, if you are always getting those stellar evals and those easy publications, how are you growing and how can your students and your colleagues relate to you if you don't have that kind of adversity, and failure, or challenges along the way? So, it's been, I think, and I'm very subjective here, a wonderful addition to our conversations about promotion. I cannot say if my boss agrees, but I think it's a step in the right direction. Again, I might not ask it in the most articulate or eloquent way, but I think there's something there. And I hope that we can institutionalize it, because if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, that question on the promotion boards may very well go away. And so, I'm trying to think more deliberately about how I can institutionalize these kinds of conversations and these kinds of questions. Hennessey: I think that's smart, and the science is behind you in terms of the scholarship of teaching and learning and what we know about narratives. It's linked to learning recall, to learning transfer, to mentorship, to relationship building, all the things that we want to do in military education. Mackenzie: That's right. And there's a great link, too, between kind of wisdom and exploratory processing. Right? That reflection that we know is so important, not just reflecting back on the things that worked well, and that worked for us. But also the things that didn't go well and how I might have thought differently about that experience and the bosses that I've had and the leaders that I've worked with, who I look up to most are ones who have helped us kind of see through their thinking when they've updated their opinions or assumptions about a topic and they can actually trace the evolution of how they're thinking on a topic has changed over the years, through promotions and through the years. And to me, that's just so valuable. And when I think about, kind of the wisest people that I know, especially in the teaching and learning community, they're just really, they're willing and able and enthusiastic about sharing. Hey, I haven't always gotten this right. I used to think this way and now I go, oh my gosh, what was I thinking there? And again it's, it's that experience that I think helps us update, update our thinking and shape the different ways that we trace the origins of our thinking processes. And so, I just think that's a really important process for us to model for those who work around us, who work for us, who work with us. Hennessey: And your students? Mackenzie: And our students, absolutely. I try to do that and maybe it's a little bit TMI at times for the students. And I, you know, I'll have to ask them because I am very quick to share my failures and to share the things that I struggle with. But again, it's only in the hopes that it will help encourage them share their own, because I think that's when the learning happens. If the listeners are familiar with this well-known book called Make It Stick, right, we know all the importance of scaffolding and building and this sort of intentional repetition of things, but also that the psychological safety of feeling like it's OK to share some of these things, right? I don't make myself look so good and so smart all the time. That can really lead to better learning outcomes. Hennessey: Yes, well, I know I'm biased because I used to work at Marine Corps University. But in my opinion, it does appear that the Marines are the most storied of the services when it comes to ethos, and the warfighter ethos is not synonymous with failure. So, what have some of the reactions been from your colleagues? From the students? I mean, what did they think about you working on this? Mackenzie: Yeah, you’re right. I mean, I just taught this Class 2 weeks ago, so it's fresh in my mind. I’d say it's been a healthy blend of skepticism and curiosity. I think Marines are wonderfully curious. You're right. I mean, yeah, talking about failure for some of them is just like, yeah, sort of a nonstarter. But for others, I mean, they'll be the first to tell me, especially in the flight community, that they do this already, that they're very quick after, you know, an operation to sit together and talk about what went well, what didn't go well, and so this is already happening. Again, I'm trying to some streamline it in the classroom, but I think yeah, I will often get like, you're really teaching this class on failure and to O5s and O6s? I'll get that for sure. And then I'll get kind of this look like, is she really going to go there? So, I have, I mean in response to what I said earlier about how accustomed we've become to these curated highlight reels of our successes and introductions, I have started working on my failure resume. And this isn't something that's original to me. This is an idea that's been in the works for over a decade. First published in I think, Nature magazine in 2012. And again, it just talks about the value of thinking, specifically, reflecting deliberately about our failures and how they've led us to where we are today and where we might be had those failures not occurred. And so, I do start off with my failure resume. Like yeah, you can go on the MCU website, you can go on LinkedIn and you can see my intro. Like, I wouldn't be in this room if I wasn't qualified to be here, you know what I mean? So why do I need to get up here and give you my accomplishments, or my degrees, or, you know, or someone else. I just don't find that useful anymore, especially when everyone in the room has a smartphone, and at the tip of their fingers has access to LinkedIn? So, to do an introduction on the failures, I have started to experiment with that over the years and sometimes it goes better than others, but it does, if nothing else, sort of open the door, I think, for students to want to maybe share their own failures a little bit more freely. But with that, comes the challenge of, OK, I don't want this class to feel like therapy. I don't want it to feel like too much information. I don't want it to feel like too much war stories. Again, there's a place for that, and there's a healthy environment where that can be shared, but the classroom probably is not one, especially in the core of the leadership and ethics curriculum of the War College. So, I really deliberately do try to bring in frameworks and authors from many different disciplines who have written prolifically about failure and its value. So, whether it be Stuart Firestein and the Biological Sciences, he talks about meaningful failure and the continuum failure. Or in the sort of the management world, Harvard Amy Edmondson’s work, on not just psychological safety, but she calls it like this, sort of recent spectrum of reasons for failure. And then we've also talked about, in psychology, the role of attribution in learning from failure. So, when I can, of course there's readings and podcasts assigned for this class, but I do try to bring it back to some of those frameworks when I feel like it perhaps is getting a little bit too much. A, about me and my own failures, or B, just too much like a therapy session. It's important to sort of bring that back to the academic literature. And then we also listen to a Freakonomics podcast for the class called Failure is Your Friend, and it looks like it has a few case studies and it has an interview with one of the engineers from the Challenger explosion disaster, with Krista McAuliffe and how he sort of made sense of and reckoned with that failure of NASA and brought in some of the work of Gary Klein. And so, I think what also can be helpful is if we end class with talking about some tools and strategies and techniques for learning from failure. And so, I bring up Gary Klein, because he's well known for introducing this idea of the premortem. So of course, we know a postmortem occurs after the death has happened. The premortem is kind of exploring ideas of how a project that hasn't yet gone under way, how it could fail. And so, we talk about that and at the end of the class, I asked students to write together or write up a reflection, an essay, and I give them a week to do it. Basically describing a failure in their professional lives, but along with that because they could have done that without a class like this, but A, talking about how they initially attributed the cause of the failure and how that's evolved over the years or months depending on when it happened. And then finally, if they could go back and give advice to their former selves using one of the tools, techniques or ideas they learned from today, knowing what they know now from this class, what advice would they give their former self? And then perhaps not just looking back, looking ahead, how could you use a class like this to inform advice you might give to a colleague or a subordinate who comes to you with this terrible failure that they're so embarrassed about and that they just don't know how to make sense of? Uhm, without getting, you know, too deep, I often think back in this work to Viktor Frankel's book Man's Search for Meaning. And he says that suffering ceases to be suffering once we find meaning in it. And I think that's part of the impetus or the rationale that I use in this kind of work is finding meaning in it and using it. To move yourself forward and the people around you forward as well. Hennessey: How can we follow you? Read your work? Learn more about these studies that you're doing? Mackenzie: Well, I haven't done as much research as I'd like. I'd say it's mostly programmatic, you know, meaning that I'm using what I learned in the classroom to inform future classes. I did write an article last year that was published in the journal Transformative Dialogues, which I'm proud of, and it is about failure, and it's about bringing in this theory from the field of communication, which is my background, called Relational Dialectics, and it's about how we navigate these tensions, these opposites, these contradictions when it comes to failure. So, like I'm thinking about this, this really difficult challenge I had, like who do I reveal this failure to and who do I conceal it from? Like, how much is this failure a part of my identity, and how much is it separate from my identity, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, I really like bringing in this idea of like contradictions or opposites and how we can derive meaning from the tension there. And again, that is nothing original to me. That's the work of Baxter and Montgomery, but just a theory that I love and that I think about almost on a daily basis. So, I have an article I'm moving forward, I am hoping. I, fingers crossed, have a sabbatical coming up and I am hoping to write a new course and a new article again on this challenge of anticipating and navigating difficult conversations and then maybe sort of tying it to resilience and tying it to the communication practices that comprise it. And thinking about again some of the contexts where this could take shape. So, whether it be in relationship repair or end of life communication or learning from failure or giving feedback, you know, having to give really negative criticism or feedback is such a challenge and again has a lot of cultural complexity there, so stay tuned for that. I am also really interested in the newest work of Daniel Pink, who has a book out called The Power of Regret, which I have loved and read now twice. He's all over the podcast circuit, so if you're interested, listeners, you could find him easily on 15 different podcasts at the moment. But you know, the main premise of his book is that regret makes us human, and regret makes us better. And I think the same goes with failure. One of the things that I've enjoyed, and I've encouraged my students to do, is take part in his world Regret survey, which he conducted during COVID when most people were at home, maybe looking at their screens, it took me about a minute and 1/2 to fill out. So maybe three questions about regret and he categorizes these different kinds of regrets. And kind of once you've taken the survey, he shows you, on a world map, sort of where you fit in the kind of regret that you have. Like he asked you to think about what is one of your most profound regrets in life and one that what that can tell us about what we value and how we might change moving forward. So, I encourage our listeners to think about taking that world regret survey by Daniel Pink and think about how failure, like regret, can help us not only remind us that we're human, but help make us better as well. Hennessey: Well, last question for you, because you do this to your O5 and O6 students, I'm going to flip it back on you, since you're in the hot seat. If you were to think about what you might share with your past self, coming into military education as not a new instructor, but new to the system, what might you say? Mackenzie: I might say, you know, I think one of the major cultural mindsets, if I could say it is, is humility and any importance of a humble mindset going into new situations. But I think I almost took that to the extreme, like I think I almost did not have the kind of confidence I should have in the material I was bringing to the table. I was told so many times that it was soft and squishy. Again and again that warfighters have a lot of rocks in the pack, so to speak, and they, you know, culture is just another rock that they can't fit. And if I could go back in time I would say no, you need to make a forceful argument to anticipate. You need to do your own pre mortem on the reactions by airmen, by soldiers, by Marines, to cultural competence I mean. Obviously, we could have done a better job signaling the value of culture. Because, you know, the culture center is now closed, so we obviously didn't do as good of a job as we could have. But yeah, I take part in that, in that fault. I definitely could have done a better job of signaling the strategic value of culture, because, again, culture is all about working with people and the Marine Corps is nothing if not a people business and so. Yeah we didn't do a good enough job signaling that and if I could go back to my former self I would have said yeah, you need to be thinking not just down and in within your classroom, but up and out with how this idea of the value and relevance of culture is being perceived by people echelons above you. And I just, I wasn't in that place I thought I was. Missing the forest for the trees in many ways, and because I had come before PME from a world where I was typically teaching Gen Eds. And I did have students lined up for my classes, not because of me, but because it was a Gen Ed and then you did it to graduate. So, I had this sort of false comfort that my classes were going to always be well received and that students would have a great interest in them. But in fact, a lot of the students that we work with are engineers and historians by background in terms of their academic degrees. So, a class like culture, communication, creativity, conflict management, that is all for many people like common sense stuff might come back to that claim and say maybe it's common sense, but it's certainly not common practice, a lot of these skillsets and mindsets that go along with cultural competence. So again, if I could go back to some of my own failures, whether it be in the classroom or about, you know, culture writ large or in the Marine Corps, it would be think long and hard about the strategic relevance of cultural competence and have a pithy elevator pitch that you could give. And don't make it long and complex and convoluted and be clear into the point that understanding the value of culture helps us work with people better and helps us build relationships. And those are some of the long-lasting skills that I think Marines, Airmen, and Soldiers can take with them long after they leave Marine Corps University or Air University and retire, but to have better lives and to be more productive citizens. Hennessey: Thank you so much. I always learn so much from you, Lauren, and I'm so thankful for your humility and willingness to talk about your own failures, but especially how failure fits into our learning ecosystem and how we're thinking about educating our military learners. Is there anything else you want to share? Mackenzie: No, thank you, Megan. It's been such a pleasure to speak with you. It's always great to be back at Air University, and your Teaching and Learning Center is phenomenal. So, thank you for letting me come into your space and have this conversation with you. It was a pleasure. Hennessey: Thank you, Dr. Mackenzie.