Workshop facilitator(s)
Andreas Kyriacos Orphanides
Abstract
Everyone experiences failure in their professional lives, but no one likes to talk about it. When we see failure approaching, we distance ourselves, avert our eyes, or – if we’re in its path – brace for the worst. But failure has intrinsic value and is an essential step on the path to professional and organizational success. And since it’s inevitable, we ought to learn how to look back on our failures to derive value from them, and how to look ahead so that our past failures can inform our future successes.
Fail4Lib is a workshop dedicated to discussing and coming to terms with the failures that we all encounter in our work as information professionals. It originated as a preconference workshop at the Code4Lib annual conference, and we now hope to offer it at SWIB24. Fail4Lib is a safe space for us to explore failure, to talk about our own experiences with failure, and to encourage enlightened risk taking. The goal of Fail4Lib is for participants – and their organizations – to get better at failing gracefully, so that when we do fail, we do so in a way that moves us forward.
This 4-hour workshop includes three major components: a case-study review of a high-profile failure, presentation of failure lightning talks from workshop participants, and a structured discussion of our personal and organizational relationships with failure and approaches to accepting and learning from it.
To register your participation in this workshop click on the “Going” button above. Watch out to not register for two parallel workshops.