WTL Issue 025 | June 3, 2026 |
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In the Slow Making
Lessons from the Long Haul
The bar of ivory soap felt waxy in my fingers as I peeled back the paper. It was big enough to need two hands. Along our little row at the laminate table, each of us had set our soaps in front of us. Also at the table, in a chair sized for adults, was an Elder from up north who was showing us how to carve. He worked a small tool through the soft bar, and largish pieces fell away as if he were peeling an orange. A rough shape soon emerged, with a bulbous body, a narrow head, and a tail.
He switched to smaller movements and tiny flakes drifted to the table. A flipper appeared. Then the eyes. A simple line for a mouth. Maybe two or three minutes in total, and this Iñupiat Elder had stunned our small minds.
We grabbed our own bars and began. Inexperienced hands do not find the seal shape easily. Soap flakes crumbled across the table. Slow, painstaking, determined, we kept at it. The Elder, whose name I am sorry to say I cannot recall all these years later, moved between us with encouragement. At times his large hands would close around our own, guiding the narrow part of the tail flipper. What I produced looked less like a seal and more like one that had overeaten at the sushi bar. Its head merged into a body that was much too round.
The lesson, as I understood it then and still do, was that we had tried something new. The understanding was that we would try again.
This was also how my grandmother taught me to knit. We would watch her cast on, throw a piece of yarn over a needle, pull it through. Then her larger hands would close over our smaller ones, each of us holding a needle, so we could feel the movement of her wrists and follow along. We would try on our own for a while. When we dropped a stitch she would help us fix it and start again. Large hands over smaller ones. This is how I grew up learning new things, by watching, trying with help, dropping stitches, making mistakes, and trying again.
It is this rhythm of trying and assessing and trying again that holds something essential for the work many of us are doing now. Behind every seal that finally looks like a seal, every scarf small enough to fit a doll, every climate program that holds together after years of revision, there is a record of failure that someone took seriously. Skill evolves through the part of the work we usually try to hide.
Climate work asks for urgency, which leaves little room for mistakes. We make them anyway. Learning to sit with what went wrong, rather than rush past it, is one of the more honest skills the work is asking of us now.
Field-Tested: How to Work with Mistakes
Like soap carving, working with mistakes asks for more repetitions than feels reasonable at first. The first move is the hardest, because it asks us to release the assumption that good work avoids mistakes.
- Expect more misses than hits. Behind every clean cut of fish is a long record of inconsistent cuts. The same is true of every climate program that finally works the way it should.
- Stay kind to your own attempts. When something does not land, name what happened without piling on judgment. The self-talk you use here sets the conditions for the next attempt.
- Keep a brief log. Make a short note for each mistake worth remembering, paired with one line on what you learned from it. The entry itself is worth celebrating.
- Ask good questions. Ask about the decision and about the outcome, which are not the same thing. A good decision can have a poor outcome. A poor decision can land well by accident. The log helps you tell them apart over time.
- Try again, and release. Find the courage to put the next iteration into real use. Real use teaches faster than any internal review.
Working with mistakes is also at the heart of a digital download I am building. The Arctic Work Readiness Assessment is for organizations new to Arctic work, including public sector teams, contractors, consultants, researchers, and funders. It covers the key players, the governance structures, the regional diversity of the North, the common mistakes outside organizations tend to make, and a readiness check for your own work. Some of those common mistakes are the kind you only learn by making. A few of them you can skip if someone points them out first.
As a 🌐 Work That Lasts reader, you are among the first to hear about the Arctic Work Readiness Assessment. If this is the kind of resource your work could use, reply directly and I will keep you posted as it moves toward release.
Signals & Shifts
If you would like to try soap carving yourself, The University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Museum of the North have instructions that will get your started. One tip worth knowing in advance is to unwrap your ivory soap and leave it to dry for 2-3 days before you carve, since the drier soap holds finer detail.
On the Think Fast Talk Smart podcast, Matt Abrahams speaks with professor Amy C. Edmondson, whose research centers how teams learn from what goes wrong, in Embracing Failure: How to Make Mistakes That Work. She names three kinds of failures that play very different roles in our learning, and encourages leaders to read the stakes and the uncertainty of their work so they can help their teams think about it and act accordingly.
Question for reflection: What is one mistake from the past month that deserves a closer look, and what did it teach you about the decision underneath it?
Take good care of yourself and the work that's yours to do. Both matter more than you know.
Nikoosh
Work That Lasts arrives every other Wednesday. Forward to a colleague who might need these tools, or reply and let me know what's working in your own practice.
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