How to learn from your mistakes and use them to improve your business
“Celebrating mistakes” isn’t a phrase we commonly hear, despite knowing that failures are inevitable. However, it’s a practise that is widely underused, and one that could influence the success of a team in the long run.
In his book, Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do, author Matthew Syed details a number of examples from the health care and aviation industries to demonstrate the importance of evaluating your mistakes and using your learnings to influence future decisions and actions.
One prominent example is that of a Seattle doctor visiting Japan to observe the way in which organisations outside their industry did things. Upon visiting a Toyota plant, Kaplan saw their well-known production system in action, and how any errors seen by the production team were immediately brought to the attention of the senior executives. Production was halted until the issue was addressed, and their process was then adapted to prevent any repetitions of this mistake.
Whilst in this particular example the system was about cars, the underlying principle is easily transferable. By opening your culture to mistakes, you can identify what went wrong as well as what went right, allowing the entire team to learn and adapt. One effective way to do this is by introducing the practise project post-mortems. Examining the outcomes of a project soon after completion while it’s fresh in everyone’s mind will get your team into the habit of evaluating their actions and those of the team as a whole, to see where changes and improvements can be made for the future.
However, handling failures in an effective way is crucial, and there are some important steps to take to ensure that this exercise does not become a blame game. When conducting a project post-mortem, create a collaborative, open workspace and focus conversations on ensuring the failure doesn’t reoccur by identifying causes, rather than specific people. The remainder of the meeting should be finding concrete steps that will reduce or mitigate the likelihood of recurrence. Make sure these steps are specific, actionable, and timebound, with people assigned to tasks that will contribute to the implementation of these steps.
