Getting Smart at being Wrong
Whoever said, “Fail often, fail fast, fail cheap,” has my respect.
One challenge, however, is organizational expectations. Some within your organization have a low tolerance for failure. They choke creativity, stall innovation, and paralyze people. Why?
Mistakes cost:
- Decline in morale.
- Lost confidence.
- Opportunities lost.
- Underutilized resources.
- Misallocated resources.
On a positive note, learning is mistake-making.
Asher
Three grandchildren are spending a couple days with us. Occasionally, one of them will dig out two short pieces of soft rope and tie things up. They inevitably ask to tie me up and then I return the favor.
Last night I tied Asher tight enough that his only chance for escape was untying the knot. It took him several minutes but he succeeded.
“The only time you don’t fail is the last time you try anything and it works,” William Strong.
All leaders are problem solvers. Problem solving is mistake making with a goal.
Smart mistake-making:
- Watch for paralyzing frustration. As long as Asher kept trying I didn’t help.
- Is their progress. Eventually, Asher stopped using brute force and started using his head.
- Enjoy their new self-confidence and enthusiasm. Complaining that it took too long saps their enthusiasm. Brag that they kept with it for a long time. If it’s taking too long, step in. If it isn’t, stop complaining and start encouraging.
- Spend more time learning from mistakes and less time preventing them. What are we learning?
- Correct foolish mistake-making caused by neglect or misplaced urgency.
- Risk mistake-making on repeated activities; there’s less ROI on once and done events. Leaders determine when mistakes are investments.
- When possible, make mistakes on low profile activities.
- Repeated mistakes are unacceptable.
- Don’t tell clients you’re making mistakes; say you’re perfecting.
Bonus: Make your best mistake-makers lead people. The fearful seldom exceed average.
How can organizations get good at making mistakes?
What have you learned from your mistakes?
*No grandchildren were injured during the writing of this post. 🙂
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Other posts on mistakes:
The Right Way to Be Wrong – “Don’t make the mistake of letting your mistakes defeat you.”
Top 20 Stupid Leader Ticks – A consistent favorite
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Spot-on! Fail forward. Errors lead to innovation and creative problem solving. And there must be a good acronym in WHOOPS, but I just don’t know what that is.
Also, have fun out there!
Hi Dr. Simmerman,
Thanks for encouraging errors! 🙂
Professionals never say WHOOPS; they say MMMMM. 🙂
Cheers,
Dan
Hey Dan, great vision as usual. I blogged on this topic a while back, and I encouraged leaders to embrace failure as a regular occurance because I’m convinced that true learning can’t happen without it. An organization with zero tolerance for failure can’t effectively grow people.
If that’s true, then it’s a key leadership skill to create conditions where failure is safe for both employee and the organization. You identified some of the key ones; I’d just add that when you’re giving team members a chance to try something new, give some deliberate thought ahead of time to how you’ll mitigate failure.
Another point: If you engineer so much safety that there is no risk, you often haven’t really allowed them the chance to fail. That’s a controlled experiment, not a real-world test.
I just finished my annual remodeling project, so here’s how I’ll answer your question about what I learned from my mistakes: A little forethought is worth a bunch. You may have heard this expressed before as “Measure twice, cut once.”
“The only time you don’t fail is the last time you try anything and it works,” William Strong. I keep having to think about that, to get it! Kids are amazing teachers. The other night with my little ones we were discussing the purpose of punishment. Let’s just say the outcome has me testing something radical that I certainly never thought I would give a shot given the sound reasoning of a certain 10 year old and 7 year old. Wish me luck!
Thabo, you’re a rare person to be so open to influence from your children. I hope your experiment works out.
It just reminds me that we can learn from everyone we talk to, if we just listen and think.
Gregg so far so good. This is a big trial for me too as I have never been that liberal (trust me how I grew up this was not an option). What I am liking now is when we have had the point of conflict, I am having to be calmer and discuss as there is no stick to use to get resolve. I am kind of enjoying it and want to make it last. One day at a time
The only reason that I became so adept at technical things is because I was driven to take risk and didn’t let the fear of breaking something stop me. When I help people with technology it always confuses me why they are so afraid to “just try stuff” as if clicking a menu or poking around in settings will result in Chernobyl. The same is true in leading people and events. One of my mentors who taught kindergarten for 15 years and then educators at the university level told me he used to cut the erasers off his students pencils. Erasers were not allowed in his class. Mistakes were to be visible and celebrated as part of the learning process.
Last night my son Lukas who just started kindergarten was writing his name for homework, and got the letters mixed up. I said that’s easy to fix, ripped the eraser off his pencil, and said just start over in this clean space.
People need to feel safe enough to fail. Over communicate their worth is not based on their successes.
You have worth because God sets the market value of a person.
Nice post thanks! I like the analogy of mistakes being like movie takes…sometimes you have a Miss-take and learn from it for next time.
Great post! I wanna ask a question. I’m up for the next supervising position at the fire dept. What mistakes should I be aware of?
Congratulations, Derick! I’m sure you’ll do great — it’s more about caring and trying than anything tricky.
First piece of advice I always gave new supervisors in the military: Make change slowly. First take time to understand how everything is working now and why it’s done that way.
Honor your people by asking them how they related to the previous supervisor, what they liked about that, and what they didn’t. File that for information until you have a chance to ask the previous guy why he did it the way he did it.
Finally, beware the un-intended consquence. Everything you do will be percieved by your people according to how it impacts them. That means you can do something good for one person and find yourself doing damage control with another. Take some time to look at what you intend to do from everyone’s point of view.
How can organizations get good at making mistakes?
What have you learned from your mistakes?
I enjoyed this post and am reminded how much we can learn from children that is transferable to management and leadership. I know how difficult it has been as a parent to stop myself from “rescuing” my children in situations where they had much more to learn from failure than from being rescued by me. And for employers, when there is the added pressure of losing revenue (or power … or some other commodity) due to failure, it takes a true commitment to long term success to “allow people to fail.”
I think #4 is especially pertinent when dealing with organizations: “Spend more time learning from mistakes and less time preventing them. What are we learning?” I would venture a guess that many, many organizations are so focused on preventing error that they don’t commit any corporate time, energy, or support to learning from mistakes and supporting the mistake-maker to keep them energized and motivated.
Paula, great point about organizations not committing time to learning from mistakes. That’s one thing the Army did really well: every operation was followed by an After Action Review that included every soldier. In addition to reinforcing the good, these sessions encouraged very candid discussion of things that didn’t go well. Often a formal Lessons Learned document was drafted, and many units kept these available in a knowledge base. Of course, the Army doesn’t have to turn a profit, but not learning can be costly for them in other ways.
Nice post! We have to reward people when they admit they don’t know the answer… and help them learn how to scientifically experiment their way to the right answer… which accelerates failure & the resulting learning. Check out a post of mine for more on this:
http://ow.ly/6p1om
Very relate-able post.
#4 and #6 are great. Mistakes can definitely be investments – so long as we actually LEARN from them! Some things you just can’t know or prepare for/against until you’re in the moment of truth!
I’m all for coaching and minimizing errors, but there is definitely value in presenting a mistake as an opportunity to learn not only what to avoid for the next time, but also how to right the ship if in a same or even similar situation. It gives us a chance to analyze process and look for areas of opportunity.
Dear Dan,
I think organizations can get good at making mistakes by appreciating acceptance of mistake. when leaders appreciates the persons making mistakes, they become fearless and do the things with confidence and enthusiasm. I believe that ” to err is human” but ” to repeat err is not human. The person who claims that he has not committed any mistake has not done or tried anything new. In fact, mistakes are indicators of your effort and creativity.
I always try to learn from my mistakes. There are still some mistakes that knowingly I repeat. These are more related to my cognition, internal inertia, and rigid belief. I do feel that there is need to re-look and rethink about those blind spots. Learning from mistakes is good symptom one can inculcate. Learning comes only through introspection and flexibility. So, flexibility is the critical parameter in the learning process.
If we aren’t willing to fail then we aren’t willing to try. The old saying “nobody is perfect” has always and will always be true. Many people will not make decisions or try new things because they are not willing to fail. These people must live very boring and unfulfilling lives. One of the hardest tasks is to be patient and tolerant enough with people to allow time for them to fail, learn, and correct, yet remain supportive through the process. Often, this results in people being afraid to try because they don’t want to be judged as a failure.
Dan, I love your illustration of your grandson untying the knot. That is life.
When teaching out daughter the accounting system for her mother’s school, I told her, “You’re going to make mistakes, that’s normal.”
Early on, when there was an occasional freakout, I didn’t rush right in hoping she would work things out. The first time she solved a problem on her own gave her enormous July 4th satisfaction.
In the early days of his America Cup racing, Ted Turner said, “I’m not losing, I’m learning how to win.”