We all make mistakes - big and small. But what do we do with them? How do we react? How do the people around us react?
Mark Graban’s latest book, The Mistakes that Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation is an interesting combination of anecdotes from his My Favorite Mistake podcast and his other experiences, along with guidance on developing the environment where making mistakes is an opportunity to learn and grow instead of something shameful. The tone of the book feels very much like a conversation - in some instances I could hear Graban’s voice. The writing is also broken into bite-sized chunks around the various themes associated with learning from action. [Note: I received a review copy of the book.]
There are always opportunities to learn in life - another way to say that there are many ways to screw up. The big question is whether one has the honesty to admit the mistake and the willingness to learn from it. Similarly, we can’t wallow in perfectionism - preventing us from doing anything until we are sure it will be “perfect” - as then nothing gets done, a mistake in its own right. I love the quote Graban has toward the end of the book from Kurt Wilkin, “If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not trying, and you’re not growing.” I like to make a similar joke about mountain biking - if I don’t come back scraped up and muddy, I wasn’t trying hard enough.
The theme that rang loud and clear was that even people who want to learn and grow will struggle in environments that punish or denigrate them for making (and admitting) errors. And those organizations will struggle to survive in the long term. Psychological Safety gets a lot of airplay in Mistakes that Make Us for good reason, as does systems thinking. The Deming line of “the system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets” applies here too. Blaming individuals for mistakes will ensure that you don’t hear about them - that doesn’t mean mistakes don’t happen. And if you don’t hear about the little ones, it is only the “big” ones that get attention and a whole new cycle of “naming, blaming and shaming”.
Alternatively, airing mistakes AND an honest desire to repair the system in which the mistakes happen is a key component. There is often something “simple” or “obvious” in the examples that are used here and other places, but there is often a hidden message. Mistakes happen - assuming that an individual is to blame will almost guarantee that mistake to happen again and again. Signs and exhortations to “do better” do not work. What is it about the system/situation that allowed for the mistake? And this is where the hidden magic of systems thinking really comes to life. Ask “why” and “how could that occur” - look for the assumptions underneath the operations. What was “obvious” to the designers that is no longer obvious to the people doing the work? What changed in the environment that allowed for the mistake?
The other thing that I saw in the book was a connection to the ideas of knowledge management - particularly in the arena of learning organizations and sharing knowledge. How else can an organization learn if the people within cannot admit they aren’t perfect - that there is always plenty of room to grow and learn. And how do you grow and learn but by challenging assumptions along the way? This is inherent to the ideas Graban describes in the book. And while he is focused on mistakes as the source of learning opportunities, it is the environment that enables those mistakes to become opportunities (or not).
Mistakes happen. It’s all in how we respond to them of whether we will keep bashing our heads against the same mistakes or get past those mistakes to find different ones. Living with a mindset of learning from these signposts is the way toward growth and more interesting signposts. “May you live in interesting times.”