Analysts’ Morning: What can you learn from failure?

In order to be successful in learning, we need to stop thinking in terms of success or failure, said Fredrik Milani (PhD), a lecturer at the University of Tartu in his speech at the sixth Analysts’ Morning organized by us.

“Think in terms of what you have learned! If you are successful, that’s great. But what did you learn? If you totally fail, you feel awful and perhaps demotivated. But what did you learn from that experience?” Milani asked.

Milani gave a workshop on reflective learning to 200 analysts that had gathered in Tallinn for the Analysts’ Morning event. In Milani’s opinion, one of the most important things to understand is that learning is in your own hands. “No strategy, personal development plan or manager can make you learn,” he said; and added that it’s not that difficult to learn how to learn.

“You can do this through simple steps of reflection: describe what you did, analyze why you chose to do it this way. Did you achieve the expected results? What would you keep and what would you change?” Milani explained, before going through the steps with the participants. When he asked how many in the room found something they could improve about themselves, almost everyone raised a hand.

“As we learned from Fredrik [Milani] the key is regularity – to really improve in our activities we have to adopt reflective learning systematically and regularly,” said Kadri Siinmaa, a Senior System Analyst at Nortal and one of the event organizers.

Analysts’ Mornings were born after our people were consistently coming back empty handed when researching networking and community events aimed at analysts. As they believed analysts deserved an event like Nordic Testing Days for software testers, or Geek Out for the Java community, the time seemed right to take matters into their own hands.

“Doing is a lot more productive than talking, so we decided to give it a go and start organizing Analysts’ Mornings — a series of events for analytical minds,” said Siinmaa. She was happy to see that her hunch – that there was a strong need for a common learning and networking space amongst analysts – was correct. Ever since the first event in October 2014, Analysts’ Mornings have become widely popular and the community has grown to more than 1,000 members today.

“There have been more than a hundred participants at every Analysts’ Morning and we’ve received so much positive feedback,” said Siinmaa. People have just been happy to have an event where they can meet like-minded people, reconnect with former university friends, or find inspiration in their quest to become an analyst. “Our events don’t just speak to analysts; we’ve inspired business people and project managers as well.”

The events have become so well liked that the latest event, this last Tuesday, sold out like hot cakes: the full 200 seats went quickly! What the next event will be remains to be seen, but one thing is sure — this November, Nortal will host their second Analysis Conference.

Stay tuned for dates and further information by joining the community or just keep an eye on our website.