Two Schools of Thought on Dealing with Mistakes
This is a summary of a part of this insightful blog post on The Systems Thinker:
When you make a mistake, you should consider it a learning experience, not a bad thing. Be like a scientist who, when an experiment gives a negative result, doesn’t hang his head in shame. Some experiments give a positive result, and some negative, and it’s all part of the scientific process: you look at the result and learn, furthering your understanding of your field. You should navigate this learning process logically, without considering the mistake to be a bad thing. Imagine it was someone else who made the mistake and you were asked to come in and conduct a blameless retrospective: you wouldn’t get emotional, would you? One company gives an award for the best mistake of the year, the one the company learnt the most from. At Google, I was told it’s okay to make a mistake, as long as you don’t make it twice, because the latter shows a lack of learning. You should be penalised if you didn’t learn from the mistake, not for the mistake itself. That’s the right way to respond to a mistake.
Unfortunately, we’re all taught to respond to a mistake in the wrong way: in school, right from kindergarten to university, making a mistake is treated as a bad thing. We’re penalised for them, such as by being given a lower grade. No effort is made to learn from the mistake. If someone was making such an effort, blame will cause their open mind to close. When we graduate and start working, many companies also make it clear that mistakes are a bad thing and will be held against you. That’s why people in companies try to blame someone else for their mistakes.
And that’s why some of us react defensively when we’re given negative feedback: our teachers have trained us to operate in the "mistakes are bad" school of thought rather than the "mistakes are learning opportunities" school of thought.
Mistakes are powerful learning tools. Each mistake teaches you a lot. But only if you honestly try to learn from the mistake. Many people and many organisations, be it companies or the government, miss this learning because they don’t have a healthy attitude towards mistakes.