Ah-ha. Uh-oh. And the Learning That Happens in Between.

There are two moments I associate with any learning...

The first is:

"Ah-ha!"

That's the nice one.

The penny drops.

Someone makes a connection they hadn't made before.

They suddenly understand why they behave a certain way, why something keeps happening in their team, or why Dave from Finance has been doing their head in for the last three years.

Lovely.

But there's another one I think we massively underestimate:

"Uh-oh..."

That's the moment someone tries something.

It doesn't work.

They make the wrong decision.

Their beautifully constructed plan falls apart.

They say something and immediately realise it hasn't landed how they intended.

Or they simply think:

**"Sh*t. That wasn't supposed to happen."**

And do you know what?

Sometimes that's where the best learning happens.

We're obsessed with getting things right

Think about most of our experience of learning.

At school, you're rewarded for getting the answer right.

At work, you're rewarded for delivering the right outcome.

In training, we can sometimes accidentally recreate the same thing.

Here's the model.

Here's how it works.

Now have a go.

Well done, everyone.

Certificate.

Off you pop.

But real life isn't quite that tidy.

Leadership certainly isn't.

There isn't an answer sheet tucked away somewhere that tells you exactly what to say when someone in your team has lost confidence.

There's no perfect formula for handling every difficult conversation.

You can't Google the exact combination of words that will make another human being react precisely how you'd like them to.

Sometimes you have to have a go.

And sometimes you'll get it wrong.

Why are we so scared of getting it wrong?

Because getting something wrong feels vulnerable.

Especially at work.

People worry about looking incompetent.

They worry they'll be judged.

They worry someone else knew the answer and they didn't.

Leaders can feel this even more acutely because somewhere along the way many of us picked up the idea that being promoted meant we were now supposed to know everything.

Which is bollocks.

Your job title doesn't suddenly give you access to the answer key.

But it can make admitting:

"I don't know."

"I got that wrong."

or

"That didn't work."

feel considerably harder.

So instead, people play safe.

They don't volunteer the idea.

They don't try the different approach.

They don't ask the question.

They wait to see what everyone else thinks first.

They stick with something they already know.

And that's where fear of failure becomes a problem.

Because if the only acceptable outcome is getting it right...

why would anybody experiment?

The power of the "uh-oh"

I use activities in my sessions where I deliberately don't give people every answer beforehand.

That's important.

Because I want them to make decisions.

Try things.

Adapt.

Occasionally make a complete arse of it.

Not because I'm sitting at the side of the room thinking:

*"Excellent. They've failed."*

But because something powerful happens when reality doesn't match what you expected.

Your brain suddenly has a question to answer:

"Why didn't that work?"

That's the uh-oh moment.

And what happens immediately afterwards is where the learning gets interesting.

What did you expect to happen?

What actually happened?

Why was there a difference?

What did you miss?

What assumption did you make?

What would you do differently if you could go again?

Suddenly we're not discussing a hypothetical situation on slide 37.

We're discussing something that happened 30 seconds ago.

That's learning in the moment.

Failure gives you information

I think we need to stop treating failure as the opposite of learning.

Often, failure is the learning.

If something works first time, brilliant.

But you don't always know *why* it worked.

You might have made a brilliant decision.

You might have got lucky.

You might simply have avoided the thing that would have exposed the flaw.

When something goes wrong, you've got data.

Something about your approach, assumption, communication, decision or behaviour didn't produce the outcome you expected.

That's useful.

Not necessarily enjoyable.

But useful.

The important bit is what happens next.

Because repeating the same mistake 17 times isn't development.

That's just being a bit daft.

Failure becomes learning when we stop, notice, reflect and adapt.

Ah-ha learning gives you insight. Uh-oh learning gives you experience.

That's the distinction I keep coming back to.

An ah-ha moment changes how you understand something.

An uh-oh moment can change how you actually behave.

Imagine we're talking about giving feedback.

I could teach you a framework.

You understand it.

Ah-ha.

Then you try it in a conversation.

You spend so long carefully wrapping your feedback in nice language that the other person has absolutely no idea what you're trying to tell them.

Uh-oh.

We stop.

Reflect.

Try it again.

This time you're clearer.

Still human. Still respectful. But much more direct.

Now you've not just learned about feedback.

You've experienced what happens when you use it.

That's a completely different level of learning.

The best time to learn can be immediately after you've cocked it up

There's something else powerful about learning in the moment.

It's relevant.

You're not trying to remember an example from six months ago.

You're not discussing what you *might* do.

The emotion is still there.

You remember what you were thinking.

You can see what happened.

That's why I love stopping an activity and asking:

"What just happened?"

Not:

*"What does the model tell us should have happened?"*

What actually happened?

Who spoke?

Who didn't?

What assumptions did you make?

When did it start going wrong?

What did you notice but ignore?

What would you change if you had another go?

That's where an exercise stops being an activity and starts becoming development.

But people need to feel safe enough to fail

There's an important caveat to all of this.

You can't stand in front of a room and announce:

"FAILURE IS GREAT!"

and magically create a learning culture.

People have to believe it's genuinely safe to get something wrong.

That doesn't mean removing accountability.

And it certainly doesn't mean:

*"Don't worry that you've deleted the entire customer database, Steve. What a wonderful learning opportunity."*

Some mistakes have serious consequences.

The point is to create appropriate spaces for experimentation.

Training should be one of them.

Coaching can be one.

Team development can be one.

A conversation with your manager should be one.

And leaders have an enormous influence over whether those spaces exist at work.

Think about what happens when someone brings you a mistake.

Do you immediately ask:

"Who did this?"

Or:

"What happened?"

Do you jump straight into blame?

Or curiosity?

Do people hide mistakes from you?

Or bring them to you early?

Because a team that is terrified of making mistakes doesn't necessarily make fewer mistakes.

It may just become better at hiding them.

And that's far more dangerous.

Leaders need to show their own uh-oh moments too

One of the easiest ways to tell people it's okay not to know everything?

Stop pretending you know everything.

Say:

"I got that wrong."

"That didn't land how I wanted it to."

"I made the wrong call there."

"I don't know. What do you think?"

That's not weak leadership.

It models what you want other people to do.

Because if the leader's version of themselves is permanently polished, correct and infallible, don't be surprised when everyone else starts editing out their mistakes too.

Nobody wants to be the only imperfect person in a room full of supposedly perfect people.

So which learning moment is better?

Neither.

We need both.

We need the:

One gives us insight.

The other gives us information.

And both can move us forward.

The problem isn't getting something wrong.

The problem is getting something wrong and learning absolutely bugger all from it.

So whether you're developing yourself, leading someone else or designing learning for a team, don't try to engineer every mistake out of the experience.

Give people space to think.

Give them something real to try.

Let them make decisions.

Let them wrestle with it.

Let them occasionally get it wrong.

Then, while the moment is still fresh, ask:

What happened?

What did you notice?

What did you learn?

What will you do differently next time?

Because sometimes the most powerful moment in development isn't:

"Ah-ha! Now I understand."

It's:

"Uh-oh... I won't do that again."

And there's a hell of a lot of learning in that.