The years I read as my own failure were data

For a long stretch of my career, I was convinced I was bad at my job. Not in a dramatic way — more like a low, constant hum. I would finish an assignment, look at what had actually changed and find very little. Then I would start the next one determined to try harder.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that the assignments had something in common.

Four rooms

The first was a “team” only in the sense that it appeared as one on the organisation chart. Six people, six different projects and one shared stand-up. They had nothing to coordinate because they shared no work. Every technique I knew assumed a group of people who needed one another to complete something. None of those techniques applied.

The second was a department going through a restructure. Midway through, its members learned that roughly half of them would be gone within six months, but nobody could say which half. I was there to improve how they worked together. They were there to find out whether they would still have a job. Both priorities were reasonable. Only one was going to prevail.

The third had a leader who had been promoted from a technical role, with no support and one operating model: when something breaks, fix it yourself, faster than anyone else can. He was excellent at it. That was precisely the problem, and a better retrospective was never going to address it.

The fourth looked healthy from the outside but had quietly decided that nothing would change. I spent months finding better ways to tell the truth to people who had no intention of acting on it.

I filed every one of those under “I am not good enough at this.”

The drunk-friend rule

There is a line I have used for years, usually to get a laugh during a talk, and it happens to be the most useful thing I know about self-assessment. If one person tells you you’re drunk, you can laugh it off. If a second says it, you should probably count the bottles. When a third says it, just go home.

For a long time, I applied that rule outward but never inward. Four consecutive assignments that went nowhere were not four independent events. They formed a pattern, and patterns have causes. The uncomfortable question was not “Was it me or the circumstances?” The honest answer was both, but not in the proportion I had assumed.

My part was real but narrow: I accepted work without checking whether the conditions for success existed. I confused being asked with being able to help. The circumstances accounted for the rest, yet I treated all of it as evidence of my own failure.

What changed

The shift was not a new technique. It meant moving the hard conversation from the end of an assignment to the beginning.

• Find a partner inside the organisation with a real mandate and their own reasons for wanting the change. Without that person, whatever we build has an expiry date: the day I leave.
• Check the facts. Most of what people tell you in a scoping conversation is opinion dressed as fact. “The team has time for improvement work” is an opinion. It takes twenty minutes to verify, and the answer changes everything.
• Trust your instincts. If something feels wrong in the first conversation, it will still feel wrong in month three. I have ignored red flags in interviews and encountered those exact issues later — every time. Not most of the time — every time.
• Contract properly. Agree and document the mission, success criteria and exit criteria before the work starts. “Make the team work better” is not a brief; it is a wish with a budget attached.
• Ask for feedback directly. I was a people-pleaser growing up, so the idea of someone telling me they disliked something I had done was genuinely frightening. It is also the only mechanism that works.
• Do not take the results personally. This sounds like a slogan until you have a rule for how many loops you will run before stopping. Then it becomes a decision rather than a wound.

The uncomfortable part

Reframing those years as data rather than failure did not let me off the hook. It did the opposite: it made me responsible for what I can actually control — the work I accept, the terms on which I accept it and the point at which I say no.

Every idea has its time and place, and I am often early. I am comfortable with that now. What I am no longer willing to do is enter a room where change was never going to happen, work hard for six months and then quietly conclude that I was the problem.