In the past, I’ve gone too slowly, not wanting to screw up my business, my personal life, etc. In fact, there is a period of my life I call my “beige period” – totally bland. I offended no one, screwed nothing up, and did nothing interesting.
On that note, but maybe for different reasons, I think most entrepreneurs are probably more risk adverse than average. In some ways, since they’ve built more up, they have more to lose if things go wrong.
Here’s the problem with that way of thinking. We are human. Making mistakes is the one thing we are all consistently good at. But, if we design our processes, our lives or, worse yet, our ethos to be one free of mistakes, our attention will be toward hiding, mitigating, or not acknowledging the mistakes we make. We will live a stifled life or lead a stifled company. We will micromanage, we will lead through fear, our team will have fixed mindsets and we will limit growth.
Not all mistakes are the same
Charles Bosk, a sociologist who made a career of studying surgeons, classified the types of errors that surgeons make in his book, Forgive and Remember:
- Technical errors – Mistakes due to lack of technical know-how or lack of skill
- Judgement errors – Decisions made in good faith but that lead to bad outcomes
- Normative errors – Mistakes made in bad faith… an error of character. Breaks a moral principle.
- Quasi-Normative errors – Mistakes made in bad faith but at the team level. Morally sound and of good technical skill and judgement, but goes against agreed upon team principles.
Bosk points out that technical and judgement errors are accepted in new surgeons. Surgery is hard and the only way to learn it is by doing it. A technical or judgement error, freely admitted, is a learning experience. A normative error, such as hiding a mistake, cutting a corner, or not disclosing all of the information about a patient, is a grave mistake. Generally, surgeons making these types of mistakes were the ones cut from their residencies.
I consider technical and judgement errors first-order errors and normative/quasi-normative errors as second-order errors. You can probably have a normative error without a technical or judgement issue, but for the sake of this argument, I think the classification holds.
By discouraging mistakes, you can breed them
It’s not quite the same as surgery, but most of the systems in our life and business are complex. It would be impossible for us not to make mistakes in complex systems. However, if we were to have a culture that abhorred mistakes, I think we would be pushing people more toward normative and quasi-normative errors. i.e., we have the technical or judgement error, but then we commit the far more grievous error of hiding it. Not only did the first order error happen, but the company can’t correct (i.e., a team member must go into hero mode to try to fix it before anyone finds out) and no one learns from it. Our company doesn’t get stronger, and our processes don’t improve.
Worst of all, second-order mistakes can be rewarded. We get away with it most of the time we cut corners, hide mistakes, or go into hero mode to fix things before we get out of hand. This can encourage us to continue down this path until we get so over leveraged on credit default swaps, we take down the economy.
Some companies focus on celebrating mistakes. They encourage team members to bring their errors into the light before they turn into the much more dangerous normative errors. In his book, The Boutique, Greg Alexander talks about how he enforced his company’s value of risk-taking by having periodic contests to share the best lessons learned from mistakes. He made it real with a $1,000 bonus to the winner. As he states, “The employees who won the prize were the ones who swung for the fences. And we celebrated them. [They] were heroes.”
The photos in this post are examples of the Japanese art of Kinstugi, or “golden joinery.” I think they are great examples of what we can produce in ourselves and in our companies if we move from sweeping mistakes under the carpet to building from them instead.
Dear future John:
I propose we live our lives and lead our companies from a position of accepting that mistakes will happen. Embracing them as opportunities! Squeeze every bit of learning from we can from our mistakes. This will lead to richer lives and a healthier, more successful company – one focused on leading through learning with growth mindsets and one where leaders will naturally develop from within.
Photo Credits: Thanks to Sarah Kilian for reminding me of summer as a kid and to Riho Kitagawa, and Motoki Tonn for reminding us that mistakes can lead to beautiful outcomes.