My Maternity Lesson #4: Make Test & Learn second nature

I live with trial and error everyday

Quite differently from the hospital, in our first night home baby cried — all, night, long. Basically non-stop. We had never seen anything like it. We had never heard anything like it. And what is worse, neither had our little one.

At around 9pm baby starts fluttering in his crib. As the growls turn into shrieks and we pick him up, we are thinking: how do we figure out what is wrong? We need a manual.

In childcare there is no handbook, because no baby is the same. And what’s worse, communication is limited. In fact, in this case, silence is the only communication that counts: it’s a sign that whatever was done was right.

The baby’s cries turn to loud bursts and bouts and we start trying anything to soothe him. Systematically. My husband rests the baby on his chest, like on the first night. In vain. The baby simply collapses on the hubby’s hairy chest, suffocating in his sobs. I pick him and cradle him against my bosom. To the same result. I hold his head and start kissing his forehead. Again, I fail. I place the baby back in the crib and I start rocking the crib. I fail.

The husband moves in to pat him gently and then more rhythmically shakes his tiny torso up and down. Nothing. I cover the baby. Nothing. I switch on the lullaby. Nothing. I pick him up again and hum softly in his ears. Nothing!

As the loud bursts rise to my ears, echoing in my head, I feel the build up of exhaustion and panic inside. My husband picks up the infant from my arms and lays his tiny body on one forearm, holding his head with the other hand. He waltzes him up and down, through ample swings. In 30 seconds the baby is calm. The bursts turn back to cries, the cries into sobs… and silence.

As I hear his breaths build up again, I move to my husband and signal “hush”, I gently shift the baby into my arms, sit on my breastfeeding chair and I ease his mouth to my bosom. Feebly, he starts sucking and shortly after he is in deep sleep.

My husband and I observe him in awe while sleeping and I know that creating comfort for this little one will be a delicate exercise of commitment, observation, reflection, repetition and learning, through many trials and errors.

Naively, we had drizzled into our first at-home night full of hope and completely unprepared, with the recent heavenly hospital experience fresh in our minds. Little did we know that the needs of our tiger cup were indeed, dynamic. And dynamic needed be our response.

Test & Learn should be a formal academic subject in schools, because the survival of new generations in the future of society and work — and the survival of the education system itself, depend on it. Design thinking and emotional resilience are finding entry in university curriculums — though not in schools. And the practice of test & learn remains the ‘weird kid on the block’. London University of the Arts’ MA in Innovation has a module focussed on Failing, where students are required to fail in a project in order to pass the exam. Such examples are indeed the exceptions.

Certain viruses have high mutation rates that allow especially fast evolution

What maternity has taught me is that when neither you nor your partner (or team member) have been there before, the practice of failing fast and learning quickly is so much more effective if you have multiple learning sources at hand, all sharing and building collective wisdom. Building a serene, effective family through change (and company culture) comes down to the practice of test & learn combined with the shameless, mutual sharing of the lessons learned and the vulnerabilities, the big failures and the small successes that make it all worth it — whether that’s shouting over to the other room for instant help (or over Slack), or a more thoughtful dinner conversation to share reflections (or the Monday call).

Maternity has made test & learn second nature for me and this has taught me the human need to celebrate success. When working with ambiguity, where survival requires us to fail in order to succeed, sharing and celebrating success helps to build the resilience a team needs. (That, and hot chocolate.)