What can we learn from Netflix in our work with young people?
(This originally appeared on the CONCRETE website in three parts)
Applying the Netflix Culture
In their 2020 book, ‘No Rules Rues: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention’, Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings, and Erin Mayer from INSEAD Business School, guide readers through the ‘Netflix culture’ and look at the impact the culture has on innovation and the ongoing success of Netflix.
Many of the practices employed by Netflix might shock people — no holiday allowance; few, if any systems and processes; the swift replacement of ‘average’ employees.
But what, if anything, can Christians working with young people learn from the ‘Netflix culture’ and how might we practically apply our learning?
A Move from Fear to Freedom
In the book a Netflix employee described the culture of innovation in the organisation like this….
“When I started at Netflix, Jack explained to me that I should consider I’d been handed a stack of chips. I could place them on whatever bets I believed in. I’d need to work hard and think carefully to ensure I made the best bets I could, and he’d show me how. Some bets would fail, and some would succeed. My performance would ultimately be judged, not on whether any individual bet failed, but on my overall ability to use those chips to move the business forward. Jack made it clear that at Netflix you don’t lose your job because you make a bet that doesn’t work out. Instead you lose your job for not using your chips to make big things happen or for showing consistently poor judgment over time.” (No Rules Rules p.139)
Sound familiar? It’s not surprising is it?
The culture of innovation and develop is similar, well in fact, almost identical, to a parable that Jesus told, retold in Matthew 25. It’s a parable commonly described as the parable of the talents or the parable of the bags of gold.
In it a wealthy man calls his servants to him and entrusts them with bags of gold. To the first he gives five, to the second two, and to the third he give just one. The man who he gave five bags of gold puts his money to work and earns 5 more. The second man does the same and gains two more. The third, however, buries his gold, scared of losing his master’s wealth.
Too often, I believe, we our bound by fear. Fear about the response of the congregation and our line managers if something new goes wrong. Fear that people won’t understand what we are trying to achieve. Fear that not enough young people are going to show up. Fear causes us to bury the gold, to stick to the ‘same old sh*t’ — even though we know deep down it isn’t working, and put up with the status quo.
How is it that Netflix embodies the parable more than the church does?! What would it look like in your context if you moved away from fear and embraced a freedom to innovate and experiment? What if we were expected and encouraged to try new things?
Imagine the possibilities…
No, really, stop reading for a minute….
Pick up a pen, and imagine and dream — tap into your God-given prophetic imagination.
Creating a Culture of Candid and Constant Feedback
How many times have you been in a meeting and your boss (or another colleague) says something that you disagree with or you’ve run a session for young people and one of the volunteers who has given up their evening to facilitate the session has gone completely off point? You have that sinking feeling where you wonder, ‘should I say something?’, but quickly the moment passes, and it’s too late to speak out. If you’re anything like me you’ve probably experienced this feeling many times, and chosen to keep quiet for any number of reasons.
At Netflix, theses reasons are irrelevant. At Netflix, candour is the norm. In fact, it’s ‘tantamount to being disloyal to the company if you fail to speak up when you disagree with a colleague or have feedback that could be helpful’ (No Rules Rules p.18)
We all hate receiving criticism — often it creates feelings of self-doubt, frustrations and a vulnerability many of us are uncomfortable with. If we know that it impacts us in that way, we want to avoid others experiencing those feelings and avoid the conflict created by criticism. However, there’s a huge range of research that we do actually understand the value of hearing the truth — even when its negative. In a 2014 following feedback from almost 1,000 people, the consulting firm Zenger Folkman found that ‘despite the blissful benefits of praise, by a roughly three-to-one margin, people believe that corrective feedback does more to improve their performance than positive feedback’. (No Rules Rules p.21)
How often do we neglect to properly reflect on our practice? How often do we neglect to give volunteers feedback? How often do we avoid receiving feedback? Doing all of these things make us better. They make our teams better. They make our work with young people better.
As we continue on our journey to some sort of normality, what parts of the Netflix culture could you implement in your ministry?
Netflix, Innovation and Moving Forward
Do you view youth ministry as creative work? Within your context are you able to flex your creative muscles on a regular basis? Does fear stop you from being creative?
There’s that word again — FEAR.
Fear seems to becoming a bit of a CONCRETE buzz word. We’re regularly talking about how Christians working with young people can move away from fear and embrace freedom and abundance.
Freedom to be creative.
Freedom to try and succeed, to innovate and to fail.
Freedom to allow space to experience the transcendence reality of God in their lives.
Freedom to believe that Christians working with young people have some job security. To believe their job approval isn’t entirely linked to how many young people who turn up in the pews on any given Sunday.
Working with young people IS creative work and creative work requires a certain amount of freedom.
Netflix recognises this, and so doesn’t want their employees to be fearful of not receiving their bonus pay because they didn’t hit their targets. Instead they pay top of market value for their staff and don’t offer incentive related pay. They realised that in order for their employees to be creative they had to release them from that fear.
“Creative work requires that your mind feel a level of freedom. If part of what you focus on is whether or not your performance will get you that big check (sic), you are not in the cognitive space where the best ideas and most innovative ideas reside. You do worse”. (No Rules Rules p.84)
Read that again.
If you are operating from a place of fear and not freedom you are not in the cognitive space where the best ideas and most innovative ideas reside.
Now, unfortunately we’re not in a position where we have to worry about getting that big cheque — that’s a topic for another day(!) — but, as we discussed in the previous part, we are in positions where we are regularly operating from a place fear and so not in the cognitive space to be creative in ministry.
Ultimately, fear means at best standing still, and at worse, moving backwards.
So, released from that fear, how do Netflix employees move the company forward, how do they innovate?
CEO Reed Hastings has this reflection; “We don’t have innovation Fridays, or innovation banners. The difference is the decision-making freedom we provide. If your employees are excellent and you give them the freedom to implement the bright ideas they believe in, innovation will happen…We are in a creative market. Our big threat in the long run is not making a mistake, it’s lack of innovation” (No Rules Rules p.136)
Decision making freedom leads to innovation.
Think about your context — do you feel like you have the freedom to make decisions about your ministry. Do you have the freedom to implement the ideas you believe in.
One of the first questions we ask our participants in the Academy Fellowship (applications for the 2022–2023 Cohort are open!) is whether or not they have permission to make decisions and implement ideas, and if they don’t, what can they do to change that.
Too often we need to seek permission to implement, to hand-hold through the decision process, and eventually give up, stick to the status quo, and stay stuck.
Reed Hastings goes on to say, “Our risk is failing to come up with creative ideas for how to entertain our customers, and therefore becoming irrelevant” (No Rules Rules p.136)
In our work with young people our risk is not failing to entertain — that would be a fear problem! But we might want to say….
Our risk is failing to come up with creative ideas for how to engage young people, failing to offer them moments of transcendence that go beyond the secularity of their lives, failing to offer them a glimpse of something bigger than themselves, and therefore becoming irrelevant.
Time for the million dollar question…How does innovation happen at Netflix?
The answer — The Netflix Innovation Cycle.
If an employee has an idea that they’re passionate about, that they are invested in, that they want to put their chips on (see Part One for the reference), they do the following.
STEP ONE: Farm for dissent, or socialise the idea.
STEP TWO: For a big idea, test it out.
STEP THREE: As the informed captain, make your bet.
STEP FOUR: If it succeeds, celebrate. If it fails, sunshine it. (No Rules Rules p.140)
They make it sound simple, don’t they!?
Step One involves getting others opinions. For Netflix this means other staff members, but for those of us working with young people it might be some of our volunteers, other members of church staff, young people, or even better all three.
Opinions are gather in 3 ways, with the size of the idea or initiate inviting greater or less feedback.
Either “you create a shared memo explaining the idea and invite colleagues for input. They will then leave comments electronically in the margin of your document” (No Rules Rules p.142); or you “distribute a shared spreadsheet asking people to rate an idea on a scale of -10 to +10 with their explanation and comments” (No Rules Rules p.142–3); or you take the temperature of the room in a meeting to “stress test” (No Rules Rules p.144) your thinking.
Step Two involves testing the idea. Run a pilot. Review the idea, see what works and what doesn’t. Make changes, adapt the idea.
This leads nicely to Step Three. Make your bet. Make the decision. Implement or cut.
Step Four involves celebration or learning. If the initiative, the innovation works, celebrate it. If it does reflect, and learn from then process. Make sure it isn’t a waste. Netflix suggest a three-part response when projects fail.
- Ask what learning came from the project.
- Don’t make a big deal about it.
- Sunshine the failure. (No Rules Rules p.153)
Sunshining the failure involves admitting when something didn’t work, reviewing and analysing why it didn’t work, and explaining what you would do differently next time.
What difference would this kind of thinking make to your ministry?
What would you do and implement if you weren’t afraid of failure?
Would you like help and support through the process? If you would then we can help you out. You could with sign up for our Fellowship Programme or some innovation coaching. Get in touch for more details.
Sunshine the Failure’ and Reflective Practice
Part of the culture of innovation at Netflix is the idea of taking time to ‘Sunshine the Failure’. It was only given a passing mention in the article, but it is worth a deeper look.
What is ‘Sunshine the Failure’?
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings describes it like this:
“It is critical that your employees are continually hearing about the failed bets of others, so that they are encouraged to take bets (that of course might fail) themselves. You can’t have innovation if you don’t have this. At Netflix we try to shine a bright light on every failed bet. We encourage employees to write open memos explaining candidly what happened, followed by a description of the lessons leant….When you sunshine your failed bets, everyone wins. You win because people learn that they can trust you to tell the truth and to take responsibility for your actions. The team wins because everyone learn from the lessons that came out of the project. And the company wins because everyone sees clearly that failed bets are an inherent part of the innovation success wheel. We shouldn’t be afraid of our failures. We should embrace them.” (No Rules Rules p.156–7)
I don’t know about you but I more used to trying to hide my failure, to cover up when something hasn’t worked, to be unwaveringly positive about events and ministry (but I’m very good at publicising the good things). Why? Because I was fearful (there’s that fear word again — more on that in Part One). I was fearful about what my employers would say. I was fearful about what the congregation would say. And there was never a chance of me tweeting my failures because I was fearful of what #ywchat would say (or not say and judge behind their iPhones).
Fear causes us to bury the gold and stick to the status quo. Fear causes us to not risk making mistakes. Fear causes us to hide our failures because we are worried what people will say.
A former football coach of mine used to talk about playing ‘football for the brave’. I’ve got to admit that none of us really knew what he was on about — we definitely used to humour him. But, I now think that I understand what he was talking about. If you play football with a fear of making a mistake you’re going to play bad football. Play within yourself. Play dull football. Play uncreative football. Play risk free football. You’re going to bury the gold. Playing brave football involves taking risks, trying new things and highlighting and learning from your mistakes.
Professional footballers spend hours of their week having their performance analysed (and not just from the TV presenters on a Saturday night. They have their mistakes highlighted to them by a team of analysts and thinking what and how they could improved and being coached into improved performance.
Reviewing performance, embracing failure, and learning from our mistakes. ‘Sunshine the Failure’. It sounds like pretty decent reflective practice to me.
But what would it look like in an individual ministry? Let’s take each of Reed’s points in his explanation and think what it could look like.
1. Explain Candidly What Happened
An opportunity to look back and reflect on what happened right from the beginning. From idea birthing to implementation and completion. Why did you decide to run the event. How did you plan it? How did you recruit the volunteers? Did you train or give instructions to the volunteers? How was the event organised? What happened in the planning of the event? How many young people did you expect to attend? What happened on the day?
2. What lessons have you learnt?
Ultimately you are asking yourself how are you going to grow from this experience. What you would do differently next time? Where did things go wrong? What would you change?
This is hard and difficult work. It also isn’t easy to do on your own. A coach or decent line manager you trust can help. This is why the CONCRETE Academy Fellowship has monthly coaching as a key component of it (if you’d like to start meeting with a coach it is something CONCRETE can help with.)
What I find the most fascinating, or maybe the most appealing, thing about ‘Sunshine the Failure’ is the impact it has within the entire organisation. Reed Hastings talked about individuals benefiting, teams benefitting and the company.
What would happen if Christians who work with young people got better at thinking about their mistakes — When no one showed up to the big event. When the talk was screwed up. When they ordered the wrong amount of pizza. (Other youth ministry stereotypes are available!)
Or a step beyond that — what would happen if Christians who work with young people got better that analysing what went wrong and thinking about lessons learnt for the next time?
Or a step further — what would happen if they then shared their learning with the other people on the youth ministry or project them, or the church staff team.
But what would happen if we ‘Sunshine the Failure’ and share it wider with other Christians who work with young people.
What if all of us started to ‘Sunshine the Failure’.
We, the individual would benefit.
The church or organisation would benefit.
Youth Ministry would benefit.
And maybe, just maybe, we’d stop burying the gold.
Maybe, just maybe, we’d start ‘doing’ youth ministry for the brave — we’d stop ministering out of fear and move to a place of abundance.
