Still more on apologies - this time, Kickstarter

A friend passed on word that Kickstarter, under pressure from public interest groups, this week apologized for a campaign featuring a "seduction guide." Here's the apology:

Dear everybody,

On Wednesday morning Kickstarter was sent a blog post quoting disturbing material found on Reddit. The offensive material was part of a draft for a “seduction guide” that someone was using Kickstarter to publish. The posts offended a lot of people — us included — and many asked us to cancel the creator’s project. We didn’t.

We were wrong.

Why didn’t we cancel the project when this material was brought to our attention? Two things influenced our decision:

• The decision had to be made immediately. We had only two hours from when we found out about the material to when the project was ending. We’ve never acted to remove a project that quickly. 
• Our processes, and everyday thinking, bias heavily toward creators. This is deeply ingrained. We feel a duty to our community — and our creators especially — to approach these investigations methodically as there is no margin for error in canceling a project. This thinking made us miss the forest for the trees.

These factors don’t excuse our decision but we hope they add clarity to how we arrived at it.

Let us be 100% clear: Content promoting or glorifying violence against women or anyone else has always been prohibited from Kickstarter. If a project page contains hateful or abusive material we don’t approve it in the first place. If we had seen this material when the project was submitted to Kickstarter (we didn’t), it never would have been approved. Kickstarter is committed to a culture of respect.

Where does this leave us?

First, there is no taking back money from the project or canceling funding after the fact. When the project was funded the backers’ money went directly from them to the creator. We missed the window.

Second, the project page has been removed from Kickstarter. The project has no place on our site. For transparency’s sake, a record of the page is cached here.

Third, we are prohibiting “seduction guides,” or anything similar, effective immediately. This material encourages misogynistic behavior and is inconsistent with our mission of funding creative works. These things do not belong on Kickstarter.

Fourth, today Kickstarter will donate $25,000 to an anti-sexual violence organization called RAINN. It’s an excellent organization that combats exactly the sort of problems our inaction may have encouraged.

We take our role as Kickstarter’s stewards very seriously. Kickstarter is one of the friendliest, most supportive places on the web and we’re committed to keeping it that way. We’re sorry for getting this so wrong.

Thank you,

Kickstarter

Applying Heidi Grant Halvorson's model of apologies to this one, it appears that Kickstarter is touching on two of the three types of apologies:


- the apology to strangers requires compensation; Kickstarter's donation to RAINN qualifies


- the apology to workgroups requires an admission that group norms were violated ("This material encourages misogynistic behavior and is inconsistent with our mission of funding creative works. These things do not belong on Kickstarter").


- there isn't a reference (at least in how I read the apology) to empathy, which is necessary when apologizing to friends, according to Halvorson. Perhaps that's appropriate. Kickstarter's relationship with the public isn't that close, is it? Or should they have included an empathetic note as well?

Heidi Grant Halvorson - three types of apologies

Heidi Grant Halvorson posted on the HBR Blog Network about apologies ("The Most Effective Ways to Make It Right When You Screw Up"). She denotes three different constituencies who require different types of apologies:

1. Strangers - they value offers of compensation (Assuming you accidentally knock over someone's coffee cup, say, "So sorry, I'll buy you another cup of coffee.")

2. Friends and Colleagues - they value empathy ("I'm sorry that I hurt you with that careless remark.")

3. Workgroup - they need an acknowledgement that an important norm was violated. ("I'm sorry I didn't make our meeting and didn't let you know beforehand. That's not acceptable. I will plan better next time.")

This is a very useful addition to our growing body of knowledge on apologies (see related posts on the subject).

Read the entire piece here.

Heidi Grant Halvorson - comparing yourself to others is a mistake; to build resilience, track your own improvement

From the HBR Blog Network, which asked their contributors, "What do graduates really need to know about the world of work?" Halvorson's new book, cowritten with E. Tory Higgins, is "Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence"

There will be obstacles, setbacks, challenges. Many things will be more difficult than you thought they'd be. The key to success (scientifically speaking) is perseverance. You've just got to hang in there — there's no other way to win. But how do you do it? A great way to be more resilient is to stop comparing yourself to other people, and compare yourself to your own past performance — last week, last month, last year. Are you improving? That's the only question that matters.

"Celebrate the mistakes that don't happen" - yes, in certain circumstances

We celebrate mistakes in this space, for all sorts of good reasons - to promote learning, empathy, and experimentation. But Heidi Grant Halvorson has a helpful reminder on Harvard Business Review Blog Network that not all mistakes are smart ones ("Celebrate the Mistakes that Don't Happen").

When an organization (or an individual) makes a big, expensive and embarrassing mistake, it attracts loads of attention. But do you know what almost never attracts the attention it deserves? When things go the way they are supposed to. And because of this, roughly half of us — people we call prevention-focused — rarely get the credit we are due.

As I've written about before, prevention-focused people see their goals in terms of what they might lose if they don't succeed. They want to stay safe — to hold on to what they've already got. As a result, they are diligent, accurate, analytical, and go out of their way to avoid mistakes that might derail their success. They excel when it comes to keeping things running smoothly.

Promotion-focused people, on the other hand, see their goals in terms of what they might gain if they succeed — how they might advance or obtain rewards. Their strengths, relative to the prevention-focused, are creativity, innovation, speed, and seizing opportunities — exactly the kinds of qualities that the business community (and our culture as a whole) tends to admire and praise.

But what the story of the Mars Climate Orbiter so compellingly illustrates is that there isn't (or at least wasn't) nearly enough prevention-thinking going on in the NASA labs. It's not really surprising — these people, after all, are rocket scientists. They devote their lives to exploring space — if there is something more promotion-focused than that, I don't know what it is. These folks pretty much own the phrase "going where no one has gone before."

Now, as we know, context is vitally important when determining when a behavior is helpful or harmful. In environments of instability, disruption, or uncertainty, a "prevention focus" can be dangerous - and can have the counterintuitive effect of increasing mistakes, by inhibiting sharing and reporting. But, in environments where precision, standardization and repeatability is paramount, prevention-focused employees are the key.

More reasons to forgive yourself when you make mistakes

Over on 99u.com this week, Heidi Grant Halvorson writes about "Why You Should Give Yourself Permission to Screw Up." I discussed Halvorson's piece on self-compassion vs. self-esteem a few weeks ago, and this is another good one. Halvorson writes:

People approach any task with one of two mindsets: what I call the "Be-Good" mindset, where your focus is on proving that you have a lot of ability and already know what you're doing, and the "Get-Better" mindset, where your focus is on developing ability. You can think of it as the difference between wanting to prove that you are smart, and wanting to get smarter.

The problem with the Be-Good mindset is that it tends to cause problems when we are faced with something unfamiliar or difficult. We start worrying about making mistakes, because mistakes mean that we lack ability, and this creates a lot of anxiety and frustration.

Anxiety and frustration, in turn, undermine performance by compromising our working memory, disrupting the many cognitive processes we rely on for creative and analytical thinking.

Also, when we focus too much on doing things perfectly (i.e., being good), we don't engage in the kind of exploratory thinking and behavior that creates new knowledge and innovation.

The "Be-Good" and "Get-Better" mindsets are identical to Carol Dweck's Fixed and Growth mindsets. The "Get Better" mindset is much more useful when approaching new tasks. One thing I, as a recovering "Be-Gooder," have started to come to grips with is this: I notice my mistakes and feel them more acutely than anyone else.

So if you're trying new things, forgive yourself when you make mistakes. Colleagues will forget them, especially if you put the learnings to use immediately. Soon, they will only see your expertise. The missteps that built that expertise will fade away.


Disclosure: 99u.com occasionally publishes things I write.

Self-compassion is more important to success than self-esteem

Heidi Grant Halvorson, writing for the HBR Blog Network, asserts that self-esteem, rather than being a useful tool for enabling high performance, may instead be destructive.

Rather, the idea of self-compassion, forgiving yourself for mistakes and failures, is more beneficial, and may drive success. Writes Halvorson:

A growing body of research, including new studies by Berkeley's Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, suggest that self-compassion, rather than self-esteem, may be the key to unlocking your true potential for greatness.

Now, I know that some of you are already skeptical about a term like "self-compassion." But this is a scientific, data-driven argument — not feel-good pop psychology. So hang in there and keep an open mind.

Self-compassion is a willingness to look at your own mistakes and shortcomings with kindness and understanding — it's embracing the fact that to err is indeed human. When you are self-compassionate in the face of difficulty, you neither judge yourself harshly, nor feel the need to defensively focus on all your awesome qualities to protect your ego. It's not surprising that self-compassion leads, as many studies show, to higher levels of personal well-being, optimism and happiness, and to less anxiety and depression.

Self-compassion is a core ingredient of grit, which you've read about here in the past. Self-compassion makes it safer to admit error and share stories of mistakes, which has the powerful benefit of raising the knowledge of an entire team or company.

Sharing stories about mistakes and failure is another way to enable self-compassion. It helps us understand we are not alone in stumbling from time to time. That's one of the purposes of this blog and of the Mistake Bank book, currently in process.