- When I do a bad job,
I feel shame.
I feel worthless
and it makes me feel worthy
of only being abandoned.
And if this is you,
Hey, you're not alone.
And yet shame is also a part
of a functioning society.
UT Austin psychology researcher,
Daniel Sznycer says,
the function of pain
is to prevent us from
damaging our own tissue.
Likewise, the function of shame
is to prevent us from damaging
our social relationships
or to motivate us to repair them.
Today, let's talk about shame
and what place it has,
if any, in building products
and services that are awesome.
(energetic upbeat music)
In 2008, Steve Jobs had a moment of shame
when Mobile Me got released
and it was a disaster.
They were trying to launch iPhone 3G,
a new version of iOS and the app store,
all alongside it,
all simultaneously,
Mobile Me was widely panned.
It was full of embarrassing
bugs at launch,
after gathering employees
and an Apple auditorium
Jobs asked them,
can anyone tell me what
Mobile Me is supposed to do?
And when his team started
to answer Job snapped,
why the F doesn't it do that?
He spent the next hour berating the group,
he said,
you've tarnished Apple's reputation,
you should hate each other
for having let each other down.
He then fired the head of the team
and replaced him on the spot,
Steve wasn't happy at all.
He clearly felt very deep shame
about this and took it out on his team.
(gun fires)
Now, there was a response in 2013,
Erin Caton was a
engineering project manager
on the Mobile Me product,
and she wrote about it on Medium.
She said that the line level engineers
had voiced concerns about that launch
and they were overruled.
This is what she wrote,
regardless of whether no
one in the inner sanctum
of dudes that Steve listened
to at the time told him
all of the things we told our bosses,
this was the system that Steve created.
He made himself so fearful and so terrible
that an entire group
of amazing, talented, hardworking people
ended up getting screamed at wrongfully.
It was his fault that the
Mobile Me launch went so poorly,
not ours.
That's a really different story.
(gun reloading)
So, what can we learn from this?
I work with a lot of founders,
so, this episode is actually
a very important thing to focus on
when it comes to making great products.
Apple did end up replacing
Mobile Me with iCloud,
which in my opinion is all right, I guess.
Apple has never been the strongest
when it comes to software
and it still shows,
but Steve's response was
clearly driven by shame.
He felt deep shame that
they had let his users down
and he wanted this moment
to be a lesson for his teams
based on Erin's blog post,
it was clear that this kind of thing
was purely preventable.
She identified the core issue.
The top down push for a spectacular launch
was not linked to what
was possible in reality,
and the lines of communication
that needed to communicate that
were clearly broken.
So, I think that there
are really two fixes here.
One, leaders need to be extremely careful
about top down communication.
There was a wrong call at some point
to do a single launch of Mobile Me,
if you've hired well,
your organization is good
enough and smart enough
to know when goals cannot be met,
listen closely.
Second, deep shame must be acknowledged
and then controlled,
frankly, as an outsider to Apple,
it's hard to know for sure,
but I've always speculated
that the incredible focus
on quality and experience
came from that deep ownership mentality.
Owners feel shame when things go wrong.
But the thing is,
it's a mistake to engrave
that shame on your team,
shame that you can never shake.
That's the kind of thing
that cuts you deep.
You should never tell your team that
that mistake is endemic to them,
a native part of that
human beings character.
It just isn't,
rather than channel that
shame directly to your team,
you've got to redirect it
to process rather than blame the person
you've got to say,
what went wrong and how do we fix it?
Let's change the way we work together.
Let's change the way
we talk to each other.
And that's how we fix this.
That's the only thing that
could actually stop you
from making the mistake in the first.
(upbeat music)
That's not to say shame
in and of itself is bad.
There's actually some evidence
that shame is a very key
part of our evolved society.
That's the idea that researchers,
Daniel sneaker,
John Tooby and Leda
Cosmides had in their paper,
Shame closely tracks the threat
of devaluation by others,
even across cultures.
One of their key findings,
the function of shame is to prevent us
from damaging our social relationships
or to motivate us to repair them.
In proto-civilization,
it was important for people doing things
both good and bad to know
when they were either helping
or hurting that community.
The researchers have a theory that
the shame system is actually designed
to give others some vote
in what behavior you end up choosing.
And in this day of social media,
there may well be some truth to it.
Shame in a way is an important simulator
for us to model what we think
other people need and want.
And that's why the feeling
of shame is so important
for good builders.
Don't get rid of it.
Don't hide it.
Don't ignore it,
pay attention to it.
And I've seen this directly,
great builders and founders pay attention,
when things they've created
fall short of their mark,
they notice it,
it affects them.
They take it seriously,
and then they take action.
It's no mistake that of the
true North stars of building
is the classic mantra I learned
from Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston,
make something people want.
Shame is just a part of what you'll feel
if you miss the mark and that's okay.
(soft upbeat music)
Things go wrong.
This is a fact of life,
no matter what you try and do in life,
you're going to have your face punched in,
and it doesn't matter at
some level whose fault it is.
It does matter how it happened
and what changes you can put in place
to prevent it from happening
again in the future.
This is something I struggle with deeply.
Can we be more self aware?
Can we take ownership of our product?
except the shame you feel,
but then direct it in the right way.
I still feel that shame all the time.
When something goes wrong,
I can spot it a mile away,
but now I notice it,
and in that moment,
I can choose to either
funnel that shame to others
and have that be a part
of their experience,
leading to a culture of fear and blame,
or I can make it a more
enlightened choice.
I can drive it to the
question that really matters.
What went wrong and how do we use process
to prevent it from happening again?
Always remember people, this is a choice.
you're going to get things wrong,
you're going to feel shame,
but what you do with
that shame is up to you.
You've got this,
we've got this.
Thanks for watching.
I'll see you next time.
(soft upbeat music)
