The art of making mistakes

You can’t be successful without making mistakes. The key is how and what you learn from them. Don’t be emotional about it, be rational. Seek counsel from wise people, and move on positively in the knowledge there are more mistakes to come.

“Everyone makes mistakes. The main difference is that successful people learn from them and unsuccessful people don’t,” says entrepreneur and business thinker Ray Dalio in Principles: Life and Work. “By creating an environment in which it is okay to safely make mistakes so that people can learn from them, you’ll see rapid progress and fewer significant mistakes. This is especially true in organizations where creativity and independent thinking are important, as success will inevitably require the acceptance of failure as a part of the process. As Thomas Edison once said, ‘I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that do not work.’

“My painful mistakes shifted me from having a perspective of ‘I know I’m right’ to having one of ‘How do I know I’m right?’ They gave me the humility I needed to balance my audacity. Knowing that I could be painfully wrong and curiosity about why other smart people saw things differently prompted me to look at things through the eyes of others as well as my own. That allowed me to see many more dimensions than if I saw things just through my own eyes.”

“Making mistakes is analogous to building muscle in athletic training,” writes legendary business teacher Jim Collins in Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0. “Think about it for a minute: how does an athlete get stronger? By pushing to the point of failure. You do, say, three pull-ups and fail on the fourth. The body adapts and gets stronger and the next time you can do four pull-ups, and fail on the fifth. The next time out you can do five pull-ups, and fail on the sixth, and so on. The process of making decisions, some of which are ‘failures,’ and learning from them is ‘building muscle.’ If you don’t ever make mistakes, you’ll forever be stuck at three pull-ups.”

“When I was a founder, when I first started out, we didn’t have the word ‘pivot.’ We didn’t have a fancy word for it. We just called it a fuck-up,” says renowned investor and entrepreneur Marc Andreessen in Tim Ferriss’ Tools of Titans. “We do see companies that, literally, every time we meet them, they’ve pivoted. Every time, they’re off to something new, and it’s like watching a rabbit go through a maze or something. They’re never going to converge on anything because they’re never going to put the time into actually figuring it out and getting it right.”

“The difference between I am a screwup and I screwed up may look small, but in fact it’s huge,” explains prominent leadership thinker Brené Brown in the blog post adapted from her book about overcoming failure, Rising Strong. “Many of us will spend our entire lives trying to slog through the shame swampland to get to a place where we can give ourselves permission to both be imperfect and to believe we are enough. Failure can become our most powerful path to learning if we’re willing to choose courage over comfort.”

Brené Brown speaking at Qualtrics Work Different online event. Source: Qualtrics.

“If you’re working on the frontier, if you’re leading, creating or inventing, you’ve signed up for mistakes. That’s the price of innovation,” writes entrepreneur and author Seth Godin on his business blog. “In our vigilance to avoid blunders, sometimes we try to eliminate mistakes as well. For understandable reasons, we spend a lot of time trying to avoid blunders and minimizing mistakes. But if that’s all we do, we’ve given up the chance to do something magical. After the fact, it’s easy for an attempt at great work to look like nothing but a blunder. But it might simply be a mistake that we can learn from.”

“The greatest pitfall is standing still,” claimed technology entrepreneur and HTC Corporation chief executive Cher Wang in this interview about innovation. “As entrepreneurs, we must continue to ask ourselves, ‘What’s next?’ It takes humility to realise that we don’t know everything, not to rest on our laurels and know that we must keep learning and observing. If we don’t, we can be sure some startup will be there to take our place.”

“Trying to avoid mistakes at all costs, or pretending that mistakes never happen, is not a viable strategy. More realistic is having a plan for when they do happen,” according to corporate tech designer and internet consultant Paul Jarvis in Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business. “Acknowledgment of fault is powerful. It shows empathy, a willingness to own the problem, and a desire to then fix it. And as the studies cited here all found, apologizing effectively can cost dramatically less than a lawsuit or a refund. But an apology doesn’t work if you’re not genuinely sorry — most people can sense a disingenuous corporate ‘sorry.’ Before you respond, give yourself time to understand the situation and fully listen to the complaint. This usually involves validating a customer’s wronged feelings, being transparent about what happened, and clearly detailing how you’ll fix the problem and ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”

“The best entrepreneurs are acutely conscious of the risks that come from only talking to people who have succeeded,” says Berkeley professor Don Moore, who studies the psychology of entrepreneurship, in Charles Duhigg’s Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity. “They are obsessed with spending time around people who complain about their failures, the kinds of people the rest of us usually try to avoid.”

“I absolutely learn from my mistakes; I absolutely remember my mistakes,” said Dr Lisa Su, president and chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices, in this Masters of Leadership interview from the Consumer Technology Association. “It’s much, much harder to remember successes because as fun as they are in the moment, they go, but boy, I remember very, very well the first really large business mistake I made or the first … Those things stay with you actually and that’s what I tell people … I have this philosophy that you really learn by examining what could you have done better the next time.”

“Take responsibility when you screw up,” writes former Disney CEO Bob Iger in his well-reviewed memoir The Ride of a Lifetime. “In work, in life, you’ll be more respected and trusted by the people around you if you own up to your mistakes. It’s impossible to avoid them; but it is possible to acknowledge them, learn from them, and set an example that it’s okay to get things wrong sometimes.”

“Make your mistakes known,” writes Liz Wiseman in her highly regarded leadership book, Multipliers: How the best leaders make everyone smarter. “There is no easier way to invite experimentation and learning than to share stories about your own mistakes. As a leader, your acknowledgement of your personal mistakes will give others permission to experience failure and go on to learn and recover with dignity and increased capability.

“Great parents do this with their children,” Wiseman continues. “They understand that their children are liberated when they know their parents are human and make mistakes just as they do. They especially appreciate knowing that their parents learned from their blunders and recovered. When we help people see a path to recovery, we spawn a learning cycle.”

CEO and author Liz Wiseman. Source: Wiseman Group

“Here’s what I found as keys to using mistakes to your advantage,” writes Brian Morrissey, former publisher at media website Digiday, in his management newsletter The Rebooting:

“Understand that mistakes are part of growth. Put aside the Silicon Valley fetishization of failure. Every organization needs to accept mistakes as a necessary part of growth to be successful. Otherwise, you’ll have people who are scared of making decisions, which will slow down anything from happening and lead to all decisions, large and small, going to the top of the org chart. This is doubly pernicious since those at the top often have less access to the data and on-the-ground experience.
“Take emotions out of the equation. Mistakes are a lot like accountability: People tend to laud them in the abstract vs in actuality. Emotional responses to mistakes — on multiple occasions we gave out the wrong awards to people — often compound the problem by leading to impulsive reactions disguised as rational decisions.
“Have a feedback loop. I am a big believer in keystone habits in organizations. One keystone habit we developed early on, although it waned, was after-action reports from events. Every person on the team at the event — operations, editorial, sales, etc — wrote a report of five things that went well, five that didn’t, what they did new. The purpose of this was to have an understanding of how to improve from all angles — and to build the reflex of always thinking of something new to try, if only because you knew you’d need to write something.
“Focus on the process. Adverse outcomes happen. That doesn’t mean an initiative was a mistake. The best place to put energy is in the process involved in the decision. Often the right people weren’t even involved who could have steered the initiative to a better place. Just because something didn’t work doesn’t mean it was a mistake to do.
“Reward adaptability. I’ve written before about the need for new managers to make decisions rather than bring every problem to group leaders or, worse, executives. Companies get tied in knots that way. One important muscle to build is adaptability and the willingness to take the initiative when things go wrong. We saw that in the chaos of the riot at the Capitol. Quick thinking aides made sure the certified electoral ballots were spirited to safety. Having people waiting around to be told what to do is a recipe for true failure.”