Manu Kapur on Embracing Failure to Enhance Your Negotiation Tactics

In the work that I do, there's a big difference between learning and performance. And the idea is that sometimes you're engaged in activities where performance and learning are. They're coupled. They're very tightly coupled. So, for example, experts in the zone, you know, you see them performing really well, and they're taking on tough challenges and they're learning. But there are also cases where performance initially suffers, but you're doing something you're struggling with, something you're potentially even failing. But there is. The locus of deep learning is right there. Right. So the performance and learning are not always aligned. You can think of them as orthogonal vectors, and it's too red. And you ask about the mindset. Right. Is to not always conflate performance with learning. Because sometimes if you take on tough challenges, like a tough negotiate, like a tough, challenging conversation, know that going in that your learning and performance may not be aligned. In fact, you may not perform very well. But that experience of taking on that challenge, of putting yourself in that zone where your performance might suffer actually creates the conditions. This is what the science of productive health says. It creates the necessary conditions for you to then learn from. So I guess the message to people is whichever situation you're going into, try to think about this learning, not conflating learning with performance, because there's always a chance that productive failure might be at work, and work for you.

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Hey, everyone, it's Kwame Christian, host of Negotiate Anything, asking you to please do not skip forward because this is not a commercial. Okay, I've got something for you. So we want to hear from you, our incredible listeners, because your feedback is super helpful in making the show even better. We've created a quick and fun form to get to know you. And this is your chance to make the show even closer to what you love. And here's the best part. If you fill out the form before December 31, 2024, you'll be entered into a raffle to win a signed copy of my book delivered straight to your door. It only takes a few minutes, and your input will help to shape the future of Negotiate anything. Find the form in the description of this episode and we'll announce the winner in January. Who knows, it might be you. Thanks for helping us to make the show even better and even more connected to you. Good luck in the raffle. Manu, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Yes, it is our pleasure as well, my friend. So how would you get us started? By telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

So my name is Manu Kapoor. I'm a professor for learning sciences and higher education trying to understand the human mind and how it works at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. And I also direct the Singapore ETIHA center in Singapore.

Very nice. And your work is so fascinating. It's so unique. Before we actually get into the meat of this episode, can you let the listeners know about your work and what makes it so different?

Yeah, failure is a buzzword nowadays. Everybody's talking about it. It's getting more and more press. Twenty years ago, when I started this research, you know, it wasn't so. So it's one thing to say that we must embrace failure when it happens. We can learn from failure when it happens. Where productive failure is different, is we asking the more provocative question that starts with, if failure is indeed a powerful learning force, then why do we wait for it to happen? Why don't we intentionally design for it? Can you find a way to intentionally, deliberately, safely design for it so that we can engage people in safely designed failure activities and then bootstrap that for learning? So it's that intentional design for failure. It's like, you know, sun carries energy. You don't wait for energy to get converted into solar energy to get converted into. You actively design systems and technologies to trap it, to use it in a safe manner. It's the same with failure. So this is not another conversation about how failure can be useful. Productive failure is a conversation about, well, we shouldn't wait for it to happen. We should find a way to design for it, test it, do the science so that it's safe and effective for everybody. That's what productive failure does.

Oh, Manu, this is great. And I'm glad that you set the stage in that way, because you are really helping us to understand that this is a complete paradigm shift. Because first, failure was stigmatized. Nobody wanted to talk about it. It was something that even if you did experience failure, you would hide it, stigma behind it. But then we started to get to the idea of, hey, failure is a tool. It could be a good thing. Hey, don't shy away from it. Embrace it. And now this is the next level, and it's saying, all right, no, we are going to harness this. And tell me about the mindset element too, because I'm recognizing in difficult conversations that fear of failure holds people back. And I want you to speak directly to the mindset that's required to see failure in this new way and prepare for it.

So in the work that I do, there's a big difference between learning and performance. And the idea is that sometimes you're engaged in activities where performance and learning are. They're coupled. They're very tightly coupled. So, for example, experts in the zone, you know, you see them performing really well, and they're taking on tough challenges, and they're learning. But there are also cases where performance initially suffers, but you're doing something, you're struggling with something you're potentially even failing. But there is. The locus of deep learning is right there. Right? So the performance and learning are not always aligned. You can think of them as orthogonal vectors, and it's to rent. And you asked about the mindset, right. Is to not always conflate performance with learning. Because sometimes if you take on tough challenges, like a tough, challenging conversation, know that going in, that your learning and performance may not be aligned. In fact, you may not perform very well. But that experience of taking on that challenge, of putting yourself in that zone where your performance might suffer, actually creates the conditions. This is what the science of productive health says. It creates the necessary conditions for you to then learn from. So I guess the message to people is, whichever situation you're going into, try to think about this learning, not conflating learning with performance, because there's always a chance that productive failure might be at work. And work for you.

Oh, this is good. Okay, so I want you to analyze this and tell me if I'm understanding this, because I'll talk about personal experience and bring it to negotiation. And I want you to tell me if I'm off. If I'm way off, call me up. So I remember when I was younger, tennis was the sport I played the most growing up. And I Remember, I was trying to transition from a two handed backhand to a one handed backhand. The two hander never felt comfortable and my coach really believed that this was the move that I needed to make. But in that transition period, it was really uncomfortable for about a couple of months. And I remember there were times where I had to still play the match using this new form when I knew I could play better using the two hander. At that time I lost some matches, I wasn't playing as well as I could, but I had to stay in that moment of growth in order to get to that point where it was functional. So the learning process was a little bit painful, but at the end of it I was at a better place. And I think a lot of times in negotiation too, you might learn some new tactics and some new approaches and they might be vastly different from what you used to do in the past. And you understand that transitioning to incorporating this new skillset might ultimately make you better. But as you're learning how to implement those skills, it can be really challenging. And the conversations might be difficult and it might make you want to regress and revert back to what you used to do, but you have to stay in that learning mode so you can have higher levels of performance later.

Exactly. So I mean, I have three concepts here that I talk about and when I talk about productive failure, first is your motivation to enter this zone, the failure zone. Right. And the idea is that you're not going to learn something new unless you're in this zone. I mean, you just think about it. If you can, if you try something and can do it successfully, you haven't learned much. It's only when you try something harder, and then suppose you can do that successfully as well, you still haven't learned much. Only when you try something that's challenging or hard and you fail to accomplish it, or you fail to do it, that's when you know, here's a gap, here's a growth zone. And only failure can tell you that you've entered this growth zone. Success cannot tell you that. So when you decided to change your backhand to the Roger Federer backhand, I say you intentionally decided that the double hand, backhand, you could do it. When you decided to do single hand, you basically could not do it. It's the failure to do that well, you were in that zone. If you know your goal, then entering that zone is the first step, right? And that's what you made the step. And in that step, as long as you try, you have good Feedback loop with your coaches that get you to try and coach you as you develop. That's where the growth is going to happen. The growth is not going to happen in things that you can already do successfully. And he talked about. It was so uncomfortable, the notion of productive discomfort. I think that's another mindset shift when you're in the learning zone or the failure zone when you're trying to learn something new. We all have to get used to being comfortable with being uncomfortable. Right. And if you're not, and use it both as a feature but also as a signal. In other words, if you're trying to learn something new and you're not uncomfortable, you're not failing, it tells you that you're not in the zone. Right. So it's a signal that you can use from how you are feeling about things to take the challenge level one step ahead. And we do that in some areas intuitively. Right. But in other areas, we really have the mindset to do that.

I heard this interesting quote the other day. They said people are always jealous of the outcome, but never jealous of the process. And what I'm hearing is that it's not just that we should develop a mentality where we can and accept failure and not even go ahead and get to that mentality where we embrace failure and appreciate it, but we need to take it a step further and seek it out. Because if we are not feeling that failure and we're not feeling that productive discomfort, then it's a signal that we're not in that zone. And what's funny is I'm thinking about the nexus between this concept and that classic, very popular idea in psychology of flow. And we can achieve a flow state in a very. In very simple ways. We can get in a flow state playing with our kids, doing the dishes, basic things. But if you want to achieve a flow state at a high level, doing something that requires an extreme amount of skill, it sounds like in order to get into that flow zone, you have to get into that zone of productive failure over and over and over and over again until you develop the skillset necessary to achieve flow and perform at that high level.

I couldn't have said it better. That's excellent. Productive failure is the development trajectory to achieve the level of expertise that can then give you flow. And I call flow productive success. Basically, it's the idea that learning and performance are perfectly aligned. That's productive success. When performance suffers initially, but there's deep learning going on, that's productive failure. When there is no performance and no Learning, because you're basically going on a wild goose chase. That's unproductive failure. But the battle, the biggest beast that we all fall to is unproductive success. You know what that is? That is the illusion of learning in high performance. It's like you get good at something, you just keep doing that thing and you think that you are learning now. That is unproductive success. If you really want to become an expert, you've got to get out of this unproductive success mindset and go into cycles of productive failure so that you can get to productive success. That is the flow zone.

Hello my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question. Have you ever wondered how to elevate your team's negotiation game and how you can help the folks on your team have better difficult conversations? At the American Negotiation Institute, we offer transformative keynotes and workshops tailored to empower professionals with top tier negotiation and conflict resolution skills. Whether it's a keynote for your next event or hands on training for your team, we've got you covered.

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Master the art with the American Negotiation Institute. Click the link in the description to find out more. Elevate, negotiate and succeed. Oh, this is great. Now I can hear the listeners. I know this is in the they're listening in the future, but I can still hear them. Manu. They are understanding cognitively what they're saying. I know they're following and they hate it, saying, oh my gosh. The thing that I've been trying to actively avoid my whole life is exactly what I need in order to level up. So let's talk about how we can start to adopt this mindset. Because I always think about difficult conversations through the lens of mindset and skillset when it comes to actually what you need to do in a difficult conversation. And the majority of cases it is difficult to do, but strategically easy to understand what you need to do. But emotions will hold us back from doing what's required. And what I recognize is that a lot of times in these tough conversations, the productive discomfort that we feel is really our natural tendencies fighting the higher level instincts that we're trying to create with these skills. And now I'm thinking about how do we go through this process of personal evolution where we can start to incorporate productive failure more intentionally in our difficult conversations.

Great question. I mean, the first thing I tell people, you know, when they're trying to do this for themselves is that it is already in you. We are wired to be like this. You know why? Because if you look at how we are when we were young, whether we're trying to make sense of the environment, whether we're trying to see what parents or guardians mean, what they say, we're trying to learn the language, the meaning of the words. When we try to get up, sit up, walk, we're constantly failing. We're constantly. But that doesn't deter us. We keep trying and trying and trying again. And hopefully the environment around us is a psychologically safe environment within which we do this naturally and we do this beautifully and we do this very efficiently. Right. Can learn so much in the first seven years or eight years of our lives. Right. Why am I saying it means we are wired to be. We as human beings have this within us to explore in a safe way and to fail and struggle and learn from it. It doesn't deter. It doesn't deter children at all. You should just see them. It's what has happened. What happens is after those early years, we get enculturated and socialized into thinking about failure in the wrong way. Right. And so that is more of a designed effect rather than something that is natural to us. So if, you know, this knowledge about us, this capability that we already have, I think that itself is very empowering. It's not something new that you have to learn if it's always there with you. You just have to reactivate it. Right. And the reason I say that is, you know that you have it because once you start reactivating and working with it, you will get it back.

Hmm.

Right.

This. Yeah. Oh, this is powerful. This is powerful. Yeah. I think it's starting off with that fundamental realization that we do still have it. I think that's really empowering because I think it can get a little bit overwhelming if people are saying, all right, well, I need to adopt this new mentality and I need to learn how to do this as well. It's a lot. And so let's operationalize this a little bit more, too. So the step one is first recognizing that it is inside of us, and then what would be the next step of the journey?

Action. We don't. So there's a distinguish between the concepts of knowing that and knowing how and typically we operate, or let's find out something about something. Knowing that rain falls, knowing that, you know you have to do something, knowing that productive failure is good for you is one thing. That's a good question. Right. Knowing how to do it is quite another. Right. And we learn by acting in the world. Knowledge comes After. Right. So the primacy of action. So there's no point. So if you're learning, say, negotiate, learning how to negotiate, there is no need to go and listen to lectures and negotiation. The first thing you need to do is to negotiate. Exactly. Act. Get in. If you want to learn how to swim, you can't learn all the theory courses on swimming and you know, dynamics of fluids and. No, you have to be in the pool and attempt. It has to be safe, of course. Right. So the primacy of action. Yeah. Is the main thing. Get up and do it. Right. That's the second step. Third is you do it in a safe way and make sure that there is feedback loops in your. You design your feedback loop. So if you're learning how to swim, there must be a coach somewhere or somebody will teach you. If you're learning how to negotiate, there should be somebody or an expert or met someone who could mentor you in any field. Take your pick, act on it and design your feedback loop. Step four, Reflect and learn.

I don't know, it seems almost like you've spent 20 years studying this or something because you actually imagine that. I love this and I love that. The first step is action. I tell you, it just shows the brilliance of the branding of Nike. Just do it. It's frustrating how many times we can read the like a robust book of psychological literature and it all just comes down to taking action. And I think people who are high level performers a lot of times over intellectualization of the problem is just another manifestation of fear. We decide we're just going to sit here and we're going to think about it, think about it, think about it. We're going to try to figure out how to do it. And I think really what we're trying to do is we're trying to figure out how to do what needs to be done without risk or discomfort, which is impossible. And as a result we just stay stuck. So I'm really, really glad that step two is, is action. Just doing that. And that is the scariest part a lot of times.

But action also has motivational benefits. Think about the next time you. I injured my knee so I can't run. But I love to swim. Swimming is my basic exercise. But you know, sometimes at the end of a long day or perhaps you know, after this podcast is 10:30pm how am I going to go? It's very hard to motivate yourself too to enter the pool and actually have a swim. Right. So I tell myself on such days based on action. Right. My goal Is to simply act, is to get in the pool and just do one length. If I can just finish that for today, I'm allowed to get out of the pool and say it's done. And you know what happens once I'm in the pool and I finish the first length? I say, I'm here, I'm going some more.

That's the power of action.

Even if it's uncomfortable once you're in it, even if you're struggling once you're in it, you find. I mean, it's not a certainty, right? But the likelihood, the probability of you staying the course and trying a little bit harder is just increases. It's just basic psychology as well here.

It's powerful. And in some ways, humans can be very, very complex. And in this particular way, this is one of the refreshingly simple realities of humanity. Right. We don't need to overthink it. It is really that easy. Taking action, and then you learn through it. And I think one thing we have to think about when it comes to not just these individual instances of taking action, going, doing uncomfortable things, but also if we broaden our perspective and think about strategy in general, there has to be some point where we actually take action. Because there's data that comes through action, that can only come through action. Right. And it's. Who was it? I think it was Patton. Either Patton or Eisenhower. They said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. And we can come up with the. This great strategy and everything. And we could say, yes, this is how it should turn out, but there will be data that we get through the process of execution that is only available through execution. And that's where the practical experience really comes into play. Because action begets action. We take action, we experience either, just broadly speaking, we could experience success or failure. And both are good. So I can get what I want. Okay, great. And now I know I can push myself a little bit further if I don't get what I want and I experience productive failure. Now I have a robust data set of real information that's germane to me that I can use to build upon and move forward, which will make it more likely for me to take action in the future.

Exactly. I mean, that's why I say act, act and act first. And the idea that the. What was the war quote again? No. No battle plan survives the first contact with enemy. That's true for just about any field of action. And exactly for the reasons you said you really get. An action has to be coupled with feedback. Action without feedback is not Useful, Right? So the learning comes from the feedback, even in science. Yeah. And this is what I was. I really wanted to say. In science, you know, there were two epistemologies of carrying out scientific inquiry. And one is, you know, if you want to understand the system, you stand there and you observe. You observe how the system behaves. You get as much information about the various variables and how they interact, and you try to build a model of it. That's the intellectualizing aspect of science. But there's another way of doing science, and that is you perturb the system. You act, you intervene, you change something. Right. And then you see how it unravels, how the dynamics. Right. Action gives you information in ways that just thinking about something or just observing something is just not going to do. In the same way, you can watch Messi take a free kick or go about his dribbles. Okay, you can. There's only so much. You have to act. And again, we're laboring this point, but this point is so important and beautiful that if it's coupled with feedback and almost any. And if it's safe, then it's the way to go.

I love this. And this gives us an opportunity to talk about feedback, too, because I don't want us to assume we know what feedback truly means. And so when we think about somebody who is aspiring to improve their skills in negotiation or difficult conversations, and they are saying, all right, I'm going to put myself in a position of productive discomfort. I'm going to try to build my skills. I'm going to do the hard things and have the conversations. What types of feedback should they be looking for in order to inform their future growth?

There is. There are several kinds. One is simply corrective feedback. This was not the most optimal. Perhaps you should have tried something else. Okay, that's one. The other is explanatory feedback that goes into, why was this not so? It builds the explanation, explanation behind. But my favorite is the contrastive feedback. Like, you don't have to talk about what, why it was good or bad. You show the correct or you show the more optimal way of doing things. And you let the learner or the person who's trying to learn contrast and you take the person you know. So say I'm trying to learn negotiate skills, and you give me a challenge that manu. Now you've got to sit down and negotiate and you observe how I flounder and flail at this. Okay? And. But you've given me a safe space and I try my best and I But I still fail. Then we sit down and say, manu, watch me do it. Then you show me do it. I said, manu, now contrast. You have not said anything. You just said, watch me do it. And now I'll contrast the two. What do you see the difference, the contrasts between what you did and what? No. Seeing is a very important feature. Right. We need to be able to see what is critical so that we can encode it. Right. You can't tell somebody to see it. You have to really design the system for them to be able. And this contrast between suboptimal and optimal solutions or representations or procedures or skills, if you give them back to the learner, that becomes very powerful way to learn. And then you can see what they are seeing. Then you come in and advise them to. You saw these things. But there are these additional things that you also need to see that becomes really powerful. It's the contrasted feedback.

And the thing that comes to mind as I'm hearing all of this is when it comes to how people are trained in negotiation, communication and conflict resolution, a lot of times the training methodology does not match the outcome that people desire. Because I like to be able to spend a lot of time with people, do a training, and then actually give people a case study that they can go back and forth on. And then they can give each other feedback on how they felt, the perceptions and things like that. And then I can jump in and I instruct somebody to be as mean and unreasonable as possible, and I show them how to handle those situations. And people get a lot out of that. But a lot of times when folks are learning negotiation and communication and conflict resolution, they often intellectualize it purely through observational learning. So they say, all right, I'm going to listen to this podcast. Hey, everybody, keep listening to the podcast. It's great. Okay, Just keep listening. But you need more, right? So they might listen to the podcast, they might read a book, and it's really. There's no actual engagement that occurs. And so you're. Now, this can be a really powerful tool. Like this episode can be a powerful tool for leaders who are really trying to teach people how to negotiate. Not trying to check the box to show that, hey, my team has negotiation certification. It's like, no, I actually want them to improve the skills of negotiation. There's a different methodology that's required.

Yeah, yeah. I'll give you an example. In medical schools, I work with some medical. One particular medical school and medicine has a very strong tradition of you give a lot of content, you Give the content to the students first, and then the cases of the applications come two or three years later. That's the standard model. And I guess maybe I heard something like that with you as well, right? You're teaching negotiation. Let me give you all the content and the theory and the skills of negotiation. Then I give you a case. What action first means is you put give them the case first and you tell them you're not going to be able to do this well, but it is precisely the safe space within which you try. You give, invent as many strategies and don't worry about getting it right. And then I'm going to give you the content, right? Then I'm going to not even give you the. Then I'm going to contrast it and then show you the content. You will find that they learn way better, two to three times better, if you just do this. And then in the medical program that I was working with, the university that I was working with, I said, you know, if you really want to radically use productive failure instead of sending kids to, oh, these are not kids. But instead of sending freshmen to your lectures in the first week, send them to clinics, send them where the action is, design for them activities, work with the clinics to design some activities that even novices can do or at least attempt that without putting anybody at risk. And then they thought about it and yeah, there are several things they could do in rehab and sewing, you know, learning how to stitch a banana or, you know, there are inventive ways of doing these in where the action really is. And so these kids in the first week of medical school, right, like high school students, right? First week of medical school, went straight to the clinic, spent a week there. People thought it was going to be a disaster. Clinics thought it was going to be a disaster. It wasn't, right. It was all done in a safe way. The magic happened in the week after when they returned to the lectures on anatomy and biology and so on and so forth. The professor said, wow, I mean, these kids are asking questions. They're engaged in a way that I've not seen previous school. That's what action does. It gives you so much information, even if you're not successful in that initial space. Amazing.

Oh, this is great, Manu, I really appreciate you. I appreciate the work that you're doing because it's so novel and also so important. And before you go, can you let the listeners know again how they can get in touch with you and learn more about your work?

So visit my website, my personal website, manukpur.com or the book that I've written, Productive Failure. So Productive Failure.com you'll also find me on LinkedIn X and Instagram.

Amazing. Manu, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me. This was a great conversation. Loved it.

Wait, wait wait wait wait.

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