The VUCA world of horses (a.k.a. learning to ride)

It is said that up to 70% of female managers in Sweden learned to ride during their youth and spent time in the stable. I can't find any evidence backing up that number, though being one of them and having been a manager I can conclude that it seems like a fair number to me. There has been some research on what leadership behaviours girls learn in the stable, such as handling big animals, decision taking, working hard, carrying heavy stuff etc. and I do agree to that. But I started thinking of grit and growth mindset (listen to the brilliant Angela Duckworth talk about it here) and learning from failures and I have an additional thought.

My daughter started riding two years ago and that also lead me to pick it up again after an almost 30 year long break. So for the last two years we have been taking weekly lessons both of us and lately my daughter has been struggling, breaking down when she doesn't live up to the performance she feel is expected of her. When she gets feedback she takes it as criticism and internalise it. As more, it leads to her not learning anymore as she focus on what she think she is bad at. That totally breaks my heart and it has gotten me to think hard on my own lessons and learnings on the horseback.

For those of you not familiar with horses let me teach you some key features and functions. First of all, they are really big and equipped with lots of muscles, big teeth and metal lined shoes, in a beautiful package with soft eyes and long manes. Second, they are afraid of everything, always on the tip of their toes and easily scared. And, on top of that, the are expert mirrors, picking up every mood and feeling of the people around them. So if you are stressed or upset, the horse will get stressed and jumpy, and that can potentially get you into a dangerous situation. So, I guess you could see horses as a living example on what we call a VUCA world, highly unpredictable, fast moving and complex. Now try to ride on that and get it to perform according to your will. It is hard. Frustrating. Really difficult, and for every move you make, you get responses back that is not as you predicted. It is actually a lesson in failure. Failure and correction, learning and trying again. And it was not until I gave up the idea that I could get it right, that the goal was to be good at riding that I stared learning. I do realise it now when I look back. But at the time, when I was twelve, it was just a really hard lesson in struggling every week in the stable, back on the horse, again and again. No matter how bad it went. And that was the lesson! I am so glad I learned to learn.

So, maybe when we talk about a learning culture and learning from failures, maybe a better way of understanding it is as clues. Clues that what you are trying to create with a certain approach creates a response that was not exactly what you expected. In Lean we often say that problems are just new information about the system that we did not understand until now. Very complexed processes and systems are a bit like horses as well.

So when we learn to look at failure as not us being bad at something, not even as us doing something wrong, but just as us getting an unpredicted response, then we can shift our focus to understanding. Then we can start testing and experimenting with the clues we get and that is when learning starts to happen. This is what I try to get my daughter to see and understand. It is not that she should feel bad when she can't make the horse do what she want it to do, but understand that she is sitting on a VUCA typ of animal and her task is to try to understand what type of response she gets based on what she is doing, and then learn what she needs to do to next. And not to get afraid or stressed and frustrated, because then the horse will mimic that and start acting even more unpredictable. No wonder that girls that learn to ride horses end up being excellent managers! Or what do you say?