Land Records Leadership Series: Learning from Failure

Failures, what failures?  It is hard to fail, or even admit to failing.  However, everyone fails.  Jeremiah Erickson says "[failure] allows for a new beginning and don’t be afraid to fail again. Sometimes a closed door leads you down another hallway to something even better."

Here are three current and former WLIA leaders with stories about lessons learned from failure.

From Brad Blumer:

"In a previous role, we worked for months to develop custom SQL views and reports to generate extremely complex bills and to recreate the familiarity of the previous, antiquated solution. While it eventually worked, it was incredibly fragile and prone to failure due to the slightest problems in the data and needed a lot of maintenance to keep running. Don’t do this. Don’t customize a functional solution to emulate a poor one because it's what people are familiar with. Evaluate your processes, workflows, and question all your assumptions about how your organization needs to operate. Be thorough and remove any superfluous complications or complexities from your solutions that hinder their efficient use. And when in doubt, change your business practices. Yes, computers are infinitely programmable, but patience, time, and funding are not. Sometimes it’s simpler to change your process to match the solution than vice-versa."

From Nancy von Meyer:

Nancy had lots of examples for us.  First, she discusses building the first County Coordinate Systems:

"At the time it seemed like a great idea. We could eliminate the ground to grid errors, build a low distortion coordinate system for each county. They would all be mathematically based so we should be able to move data from one to another easily. And all those projection distortions and ground to grid corrections could be eliminated.

Yeah, No. Although the original definitions were defined to project better in GIS, measurement, and surveying technology - yeah, still no.

My takeaway is we are all professionals. From the measurement takers to the aerial photographers to drone specialists to the mappers to the application developers. It’s just math. The mapping is essentially a “digital twin” of reality, so what are we minimizing the distortion of, exactly? In the end the spatial data sets are so much easier to intake and combine and vertically align and track over time if we just use some basic projections and coordinate systems, even the original UTM ½ zone the DNR used in the 80’s and 90’s. So many phenomena extend across many counties or affect parts of many counties. It just makes more sense to keep the digital representations as easily combinable as possible and to not add the mystery of another projection."

Her second example points to not fully embracing digital representation versus authoritative source:

"This is the axiom that 'the best digital data has the least accuracy you can use that does not impact the decision.' Bear with me a minute here. I can and have spent a lot of time and resources to get a highly accurate digital representation of a feature and then combine that with other data that may or may not be as accurate and then toil over resolving the differences. In the end, much of that fine detail did not impact or change the decision.

I will grant there are exceptions. Precision Ag needs to know when and where to add fertilizer and how to space seeds. The fence post must go some place and getting it as correctly placed the first time reduces adjoining landowner tensions. But I contend that just because we can measure to the millimeter, should we? Should I have spent more time presenting the results in a clear manner on a widely accessible forum (i.e., the internet) to make the case or present the real differences that mattered? And what factors do matter? Understanding the factors that influence decisions may be more important than measuring to the nth element.

I have learned that in the end, having easily indexed searchable access to the legal recorded record is at least as important if not more important than a digital map that represents it. Knowing what to map is more important than the accuracy of the mapping."

"Don’t ever think you know it all, the minute you stop learning and growing is the day you should retire."  - Jon Schwichtenberg

From Mike Koutnik:

"Many years ago, though already with 10 years of professional experience, I had a job interview. I was about to be let go in a significant corporate downsizing. I connected with a recruiter who set me up with an interview. I wasn't terribly excited about the job, but it would have allowed me to stay in the area where I was currently employed, near my wife's family. The interview was embarrassing. I didn't present myself well. And I didn't do enough homework. Had I done so, I would have realized the recruiter didn't know enough about me, and the job wasn't a good fit. In every future interview or project proposal meeting, I was as prepared as I could reasonably be, was committed to, was truly interested in, and even enthusiastic about the prospect. In retrospect, enthusiasm has consistently been a characteristic interviewers noted. I didn't have enthusiasm during that awful interview."

 "Do your best and keep learning. If a situation is not right for you, do not be afraid to move on." - Larry Cutforth

Failure is never the desired result, but we can and should learn from it. The trick is to figure out why you failed and how to change your approach the next time.  In Mike's example, the solution was to prepare more and be enthusiastic. In Brad's story, he learned sometimes it is better to change the process to match the software solution. In both of Nancy's stories, she broadened her perspective to help figure out the essential pieces needed to get the desired result - make sure you're solving the right problem, and that it's actually your problem to solve.

Contributors to this article include:

• Brad Blumer – GIS Coordinator with the City of Waukesha
• Jeremiah Erickson – GIS Coordinator/ Land Information Officer with the Monroe County Land Information Office
• Jon Schwichtenberg - Minneapolis Office Manager at GRAEF
• Larry Cutforth - GIS Section Chief at Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
• Mike Koutnik - Owner at Michael A. Koutnik Consulting
• Nancy von Meyer - President at Fairview Industries

If you want to read more about learning from failure, check out these resources:

It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership by Colin Powell – In this book, Colin Powell describes many leadership lessons.  Chapter thirty-five titled "February 5, 2003: The United Nations" describes what he learned from one of his biggest failures.

The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well by Dr. Amy Edmondson – In this book, Dr. Edmondson says, "We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well."

Image credits:
failure by samsulit fromfailure by samsulit from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)

failure by remmachenasreddine from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)