Mistakes Were Made

When I was in the fifth grade, I had what my teacher declared was the best reason she had ever heard for not having your homework.

The day prior, I had walked home from school with my friend Allison. It was a beautiful day—one that had started cold but was now sunny and warm, and Allison’s piano lessons had been canceled that week. We decided to play outside. We invented some ridiculous game of tag that required four “bases,” so we put my coat on my porch, her coat under a tree, her backpack on my driveway, and my bookbag on the curb by the trashcans.

It was Thursday, which was trash day, but the garbage was always picked up in the morning. However, not that day. Monday had been Columbus Day and they were still making up for a lost day of service. Hungry from playing tag, Allison invited me over to her house for a snack because her mom had made cookies the day before.

What happened next is what my 10-year-old self dramatically declared was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and what Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson would call a “complex failure.” My bookbag was thrown into the trash truck and flattened.

BUT HOW WOULD YOU CHARACTERIZE YOUR FAILURE?

We have all experienced complex failures. If any one thing had been even slightly different, it would never have happened. If Allison’s piano lesson hadn’t been canceled, if I had placed my bag under the tree instead of by the curb, if the garbage had been collected at its normal time, if Allison’s mom hadn’t made cookies. Everything had to line up just so for this colossal error to occur.

At Maestro, we’re all about learning from our own and others’ mistakes. Our proprietary sales method is called Phoenix because it incorporates lessons from failed deals of the past. Professionals learn from their mistakes, reincarnate into stronger versions of themselves, and help others avoid the flames of lost sales.

Making mistakes is a given, but learning from them is not. That’s why I was excited to read Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, written by Edmondson and published last month. Edmondson spends the first section of her book delineating different types of failure. My bookbag scenario is a great example of what she terms a complex failure. (You’re welcome.)

Complex failures happen in familiar settings, have more than one cause, include external factors outside of your control, and are generally preceded by small warning signs that get missed, ignored, or downplayed. (Fine, yes, I likely saw that the trashcans were still full, and I probably tuned out the sound of the trash truck making its way through the neighborhood.)

Edmondson identifies two other categories of failures—basic and intelligent. Basic failures are those that occur in familiar territory and tend to have a single cause. They happen because we don’t use the knowledge we have available to us, and they happen often. You cut yourself while slicing a bagel, you back out and hit the car behind you, you forget to douse your campfire and start a forest fire that burns 50,000 acres. I added that last one in just so you didn’t think basic necessarily means inconsequential.

Finally, there are intelligent failures. If you’re going to fail (and you are), these are the best failures to have. Intelligent failures take place in unknown territory, present an opportunity to advance toward a goal, are informed by available knowledge, and are as small as possible while still providing insight. Your new drug fails in the laboratory; you don’t see the behavior you hypothesized in your test subjects; your new concoction can seal any two items together in an unbreakable bond but still disintegrates when exposed to UV light. These failures, while disappointing, are part of the journey of reaching a goal.

If you aren’t willing to fail, you can’t do anything new or innovative. Intelligent failure is what leads to new solutions, products, and ideas. While Edmondson admits that not all types of failure are equal, she firmly believes that we have to be willing to learn from any kind of failure in order to improve.

LIONS AND TIGERS AND FAILURE—OH, MY

Edmondson states that failure is an example of a “prepared fear.” Prepared fears stem from threats that have been evolutionarily persistent enough and serious enough that the fear of them has left a genomic imprint. Fear of snakes, blood, and deep water are all examples of prepared fears.

Why is the fear of failure so strong? When we have done something wrong, we fear rejection from others. Being cast out from the tribe was a death sentence for most of our evolutionary history, so even the thought that others will view us differently or reject us activates our fight-or-flight response. Guess what you can’t do when you’re in fight-or-flight mode? Learn.

This is one reason why admitting to, let alone learning from, our own failures is so difficult. Simply telling someone to learn from their mistakes is short-sighted. As a leader, explaining to your team that you want them to embrace failure as a learning opportunity is a start, but it’s not enough to overcome the saber-toothed-tiger level of fear that screwing up produces.

YOU CAN’T LEARN FROM MISTAKES YOU DON’T ADMIT

Discovering how not to deal with failure is what got Amy Edmondson started in her failure studies as a graduate student in organizational behavior. Recent findings from NASA had shown that flight teams that had been working together for three days (and were short on sleep) did better in flight simulations than freshly rested new teams. These were not the findings that had been expected. Working well as a team was a more important factor than lack of fatigue when it came to flight safety.

Edmondson was a graduate student working on a study to find out if the same thing held true in hospitals. Were the teams that worked well together making fewer mistakes than those that had lower teamwork scores? It turns out that they weren’t. Based on Edmondson’s data, the high-functioning teams were making more mistakes than their dysfunctional counterparts.

That didn’t make any sense. Upon further study, however, it made perfect sense. The high-functioning teams weren’t making more mistakes, but they were reporting more of the mistakes they made. Teams that don’t work well together, that feel their teammates will blame and judge them for making an error, don’t report their errors. You can’t learn as a team from a mistake if the mistake is never officially acknowledged.

So that was Edmondson’s first lesson on (not) learning from mistakes. Punishing people for making mistakes didn’t make them less likely to make them. It just made them less likely to report them, which increased the chances of basic failures overall.

Edmondson’s book provides an excellent overview of different kinds of mistakes. She is honest in her explanations of why it is so hard for humans to admit and learn from mistakes, even when they are committed to doing so, and why punishing mistakes is sure to backfire. So, how do we foster teams that are able to learn from their own and others’ errors? That’s what we’ll be discussing in next week’s blog. Until then, don’t be so hard on yourself if you mess up, and for goodness’ sake, don’t leave anything next to the trashcans!

Are you interested in learning from the blunders of others? Reach out at mastery@maestrogroup.co for information on Maestro’s many learning opportunities.