I was rewatching Season 1 of Slow Horses recently because Season 6 has brought back characters from previous seasons who apparently are Very Important People.

Unfortunately, I had absolutely no idea who some of them were.

This, by the way, is the problem with streaming television. When a season takes approximately seventeen years to arrive, I need a character roster, a family tree and possibly a forensic accountant to remember what the hell happened.

Anyway, back to Season 1.

Episode One is titled “Failure Is Contagious.”

And I wondered whether it is.

Many things are contagious.

Laughter.
Yawning.
Panic.

Hysteria.
Optimism.
Groupthink.
Bad ideas at meetings.

So perhaps failure is contagious, too.

One person’s spectacular screw-up can become another person’s lowered expectations. A team that begins to believe it can’t succeed may stop trying quite as hard. Organizations can develop cultures where mediocrity becomes the norm, not because everyone is incapable, but because everyone has learned what happens when they stick their necks out.

And then there is the opposite phenomenon. Competence can be contagious. So can courage. So can curiosity. One person says, “Wait. Why are we doing it this way?” and suddenly everyone is looking at the problem differently.

Maybe failure isn’t contagious in the way a virus is.

Maybe expectation is.

We absorb the emotional climate around us. We watch what happens to other people. We learn what is rewarded, what is punished, what is tolerated and what is possible.

Which means we have to be careful about the stories we spread.

We’re terrible at this.

Nothing ever works.

That’s just how things are.

Don’t bother.

Those statements can become self-fulfilling little psychological germs.

But so can:

Let’s try.

We can fix it.

That didn’t work. What did we learn?

Again.

Perhaps the real contagion isn’t failure.

Perhaps it is belief.

And that means we have considerably more control over what we catch and what we give away than we sometimes think.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have approximately five seasons of Slow Horses to psychologically reconstruct before I forget who everyone is again.