Seems I have been reading a lot of material on the topic of "mistakes" lately.
Jim Collins (the opening keynote speaker for HR.com´s Employers of Excellence Conference 2005) was featured on the cover of Fortune Magazine. In the article entitled "Jim Collins on Tough Calls," Jim is quoted as saying:
"You can make mistakes even some big mistakes, and still prevail. That´s a wonderful thing to know. You don´t need a perfect hit rate."
How true, but how many of us think we should be able to achieve an almost perfect hit rate? And what are the costs of this perception? Does this perception result in a reluctance to admit to and evaluate mistakes, or negatively impact our willingness to seek out additional information and continuously learn?
Many mistakes have brought positive results. For example, mistakes have brought us:
Cheese: - an ancient Arabian traveled the desert with a pouch made of a sheep´s stomach filled with milk: the heat and digestive juices in the homemade bag created curd
Chocolate Chip Cookies: - a baker at the Toll House Inn substituted broken pieces of semi sweet chocolate for bakers´ chocolate thinking they would melt while baking to make chocolate cookies
Tea: - a Chinese emperor was boiling water outside near a bush - the leaves fell into the boiling water
Penicillin: - Fleming, a bacteriologist, set a laboratory dish with staphylococci bacteria by an open window - mold blew onto the plate and contaminated the plate allowing him to see the two interact
Post-it Notes: - a 3M researcher trying to make a strong adhesive invented a weaker adhesive which was later used by another employee to invent post-it notes
(Mistakes That Worked - 40 Familiar Inventions and How They Came to Be by Charlotte Foltz Jones).
It is an interesting topic, one around which we all have made assumptions that influence our behavior. Our response to what we view as a "mistake" often has deep roots in our early learning experience, but is also very tied to the culture or environment we are in. The question really is how to best go about learning from our mistakes.
In a recent edition of Harvard Business School´s Working Knowledge (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ HBSWK Pub Date Aug 22, 2005), Amy Edmondson, Anita Tucker and Steven Spear discuss problem solving patterns in relation to the identification of problems in a system or established process. In the article, entitled "Why Your Organization Isn´t learning All It Should," the authors point out that recurring day-to-day problems are often signs of procedures that need to be changed. They go on to explore problem-solving approaches in more depth, but I think the initial point is quite relevant when it comes to performance management. In the example discussed, the result of the commonly used method of problem solving was that employees solved problems vital to their job duties, but did not evaluate problems in the system. The result was that some significant areas in which efficiency and effectiveness could have been improved were not addressed, or were overlooked altogether.
Performance Management addresses both the individual effectiveness and the "system´s" effectiveness; ensuring processes are sound and that individuals are engaged and their efforts are aligned with business strategy. However, in order to encourage individuals to evaluate processes and voice their opinion when improvements seem necessary, there must be a certain level of openness to suggestions along with an understanding that mistakes will be made: the ability to discuss where we went wrong and how to improve maximizes learning. Amy Edmondson contributed to another article along with Mark D Cannon entitled: "The Hard Work of Failure Analysis." In this article, the authors discuss the benefits of completing a detailed evaluation of our failures. They point out that "Conducting an analysis of a failure requires a spirit of inquiry and openness, patience, and a tolerance for ambiguity." Part of our role in HR is knowing how to create this spirit.
As Theodore Roosevelt once said:
"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
And in this "spirit," I feel confident that many of us have learned some of our most valuable lessons as a result of a "mistake."
