Today I had every intention of blogging one thing but then the Mavericks at Work post today (which reminded me of an earlier Penelope Trunk post) changed my mind. Both of which reminded me of my preservice teaching experiences over a decade ago.
When I was a student teacher, I remember my student teacher supervisor using the aphorism, "Success breeds success. Failure breeds failure." No, he wasn't trying to stereotype children based on their parentage; he we trying to tell us that if we provided opportunities for our students to be successful they would want to keep succeeding. Conversely, if the system were set up for early failure, they would repeatedly fail.
When faced with a barrier to success, there are really two types of people: those who will try to break the barrier or those who will accept the barrier.
- Penelope Trunk talks about identifying and breaking personal barriers (the example she gives may be a small one but she uses it as a metaphor for larger life barriers). She clearly is one of the latter personality types.
- Bill Taylor's Mavericks at Work post is all about what happens when someone like Penelope Trunk breaks a barrier that others felt unbreakable. Eventually those in the former group will follow her lead.
The Penelope Trunks of the organization are the mentors and motivators to others. Given too many barriers within an organization, they forge new paths elsewhere, and the others accept their lot. Thus the successful relocate and failure breeds.
The key to breeding success, then, is to allow for the "mavericks", or the Penelope Trunks, to exist and to provide opportunities for them to do what they do best: amelioration. They are the ones who break barriers, push envelopes, and encourage the entire organizational culture to move forward with them. Success breeding success.
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