(The headline for this blog post mistakenly was emailed out with a big pile of nothing under it earlier this week — many people have told me it was some of my best work. Mea culpa.)
I got a bit carried away last week tying in Freytag’s pyramid with case-based CME in the blog, so I held over part of what I planned to share for this week. I know, I know, you have been waiting breathlessly with anticipation.
Among the other themes of the recent Alliance Industry Summit (AIS), as with basically every other conference ever developed, was “celebrating our successes.” This is where groups get up and talk about the wildly successful initiative they worked on last year, with innovative educational design frameworks, carefully planned partnerships, and outcomes that shine. Of course, it can inspire ideas of your own when you hear about other successful projects, but as one of the presenters (I think it was during the keynote, but I’m not sure) noted, “Why aren’t we talking about the projects that didn’t do so well? Isn’t there something we can learn from those?” (note from Derek: um…that was me. I said that. Thanks for coming to my session.)
But owning up to, and shining a spotlight on, our professional failures exposes us as something less than complete and utter successes. It can be embarrassing and humiliating to talk about projects that failed to live up to our lofty ambitions, even though we all have many, many of these to address. And so, we tuck these failures away into those little spaces that no one at civilized parties ever talks about, and we pretend they never happened.
Now, I’m not talking about those grand rounds or live webinars where no one (or almost no one) shows up — that happens a lot more than people are willing to admit. Or those recorded sessions where the audio feed cuts out for a minute or two — annoying but not catastrophic. I am talking about those crazy ideas that proved to be, well, crazy. But also, perhaps instructional for our community.
So, since I really don’t care if I am ridiculed or humiliated, I’ll go first (and, sigh, probably last. Wimps. Prove me wrong in the comments here or on our LinkedIn post.).
MY BIGGEST PROFESSIONAL FAILURE
This goes back about 18 or so years ago when I was working for a midsized medical education company. I had read something about the value of small group learning and indeed was coming off of a project where we had a lot of success educating teams of 15-20 learners in the live setting. So, I started noodling around with the concept of bringing small group learning to the satellite symposium — essentially, the antithesis of the small group setting.
Here was my idea: we’d divide up the big ballroom that held 150 learners into three separate rooms with those portable wall dividers you sometimes see in physical meeting spaces. We’d have three different stages and three faculty who would rotate through the rooms on a very specific time schedule (15 minutes in each room, with 5 minutes to move to the next room). All 150 learners would eventually get the same education, but each room would get that education in a different order — our faculty members would present their own content three times. The faculty would be asked to interact and engage with each “small group” of 50 learners, giving the education a more personal feel.
Yes, it was weird, but it was different and unique, which apparently was good enough to attract funding from multiple supporters. Perhaps my written description was just vague enough within our grant request so that the supporters couldn’t see how genuinely unwieldly this program was likely to be. I do distinctly remember one of the funders who told me onsite prior to our symposium, “I don’t understand what you are trying to do even a little bit.” That obviously filled me with confidence.
The physical setup of the room went OK. We had plenty of time to work with the hotel labor team to set up the physical walls between the rooms and equally divide up the tables. Our faculty seemed to understand the general concept — these were all people I had worked with before, so they trusted me (fools!) and didn’t try to question how or why this was going to work.
But then the learners started showing up. They didn’t understand why some people were asked to go into one room while some went into another. It took a long time to get everything situated — too long, of course — which meant we started the symposium 5 minutes late. I had to run between the 3 rooms to get everyone on the same schedule to make sure all of the presentations started more or less simultaneously.
Problem #1 averted (sort of).
Then the presentations start, and it becomes clear that these folding walls weren’t sufficiently muffling the noise between each room. You could clearly hear the presentation in the adjacent room, which not only annoyed attendees but also threw off faculty as well. There was no interaction between anyone. But no time to complain or try to fix anything, because it was time to switch rooms. DING!
Faculty 1 ran from room 1 to room 2, faculty 2 ran from room 2 to room 3, and faculty 3 circled from room 3 to room 1. For this first switch, the timing worked OK, but it was clearly a challenge to get mentally adjusted to the new room and the next presentation. Faculty were frazzled and learners were disjointed. The noise again carried throughout the rooms. Faculty covered maybe 50% of the planned content in this second segment because we were running behind and everything was confusing. Still no “small group” interaction that I had hoped for. But no time to complain or try to fix anything, because it was time to switch rooms. DING!
Faculty 3 ran from room 1 to room 2, faculty 1 ran from room 2 to room 3, and faculty 2 circled from room 3 to room 1. We were now 10 minutes behind, which meant that faculty had 5 minutes to give their final presentation. I was still putting up a good front (I think), but on the inside, I was working on my resume. Just in case.
When the time was finally up and the faculty had collapsed in a heap at the side of their stage, I congratulated them on doing such a great job under fairly trying circumstances. One of them said to me, “Let’s not do that again.” Good idea.
So, what did I learn from this experience (and perhaps what can you learn as well)? First, there is nothing wrong with thinking out of the box and coming up with creative ideas to liven up our education, but there are limits to what we can and should do. Second, be realistic in your educational plans. But most of all, don’t be afraid to fail. That is how we grow professionally. I am not embarrassed or ashamed to tell this story of my biggest failure — I tried my best and really did work with my team to plan for what we hoped was going to be something unique and successful. It was just a dumb idea that should never have gotten off the ground. It happens to all of us.
The Ship of Theseus (a.k.a. Theseus’s Paradox) is a thought experiment about, to quote Wikipedia, “whether an object is the same object after having all of its original components replaced over time.” If I have a boat and, over time, I have replaced the rudder, the sail, the deck, the anchor, etc., is it still the same boat? If not, when did it stop being the same boat? (Before I am accused of once again making an obscure reference to something I read in a book recently, I’d like to clarify that my first exposure to the Ship of Theseus was through a podcast called The Rights to Ricky Sanchez which is, of course, a Philadelphia 76ers themed podcast. Apologies to all you Thomas Hobbes podcast fans out there.)
CMEPALOOZA 