Making mistakes

In high performing organisations, the rate of learning is greater than the rate of change. This means both the rate of collective learning - the knowledge, skills and capabilities that are being embedded in the organisation, to be passed down from one generation of employees to the next. But it also means the rate of individual learning, which is the main driver of collective learning.

Here is an uncomfortable truth: Individual learning involves making mistakes.

Partly this is because the most powerful lessons in life are often the ones that come from first hand experience. My friend Maria Campbell talked on a panel on managing risk about how, when her son was very little, she saw that he was about to crawl off the sofa and fall onto the floor. Because she could see that if he fell off he wouldn’t be injured, she judged that this was a valuable opportunity for him to learn something for himself about the world in a way that would be more active and useful knowledge than a lesson learned only in theory (“don’t fall off or you’ll hurt yourself!”). As my own parents used to say a lot: “you have to make your own mistakes in life”.

Mistakes are also part of learning because learning is about experimentation. In Michael and Freddy Ballé’s business fable The Lean Manager, the fictional company’s global CEO has a rule of thumb that everyone is wrong 50% of the time, even him. High performing organisations often embrace a version of the scientific method at work, where they are more interested in the data that comes from experimentation (“we tried this thing - did it work?”) than in the data that lives in a massive central computer. This empirical orientation, where you make a plan, take an action, and check to see what effect it had, only leads to powerful learning if you are open to being wrong. Your action might have the opposite effect to the one you hoped, or it might have no effect at all. (If you’re not open to the frustration of this kind of non-result, you end up with a replication crisis.)

If you want to be a high performing organisation, you are going to have let people make mistakes. As a leader and manager, you are going to have learn to assess the risk in a situation, and when it is low, let people fail. And then ask “OK, so, what have you learned now? What are you going to do with his new information?”