I still remember making a mistake as a young supervisor that cost the company I worked for $3,500.00. Of course my immediate thoughts were that I would at best be chastised and at worst be sacked. My punishment was a little loss of face as what I had done became a training bulletin to discourage others in similar positions from making the same mistake. The pleasant and valuable experience that resulted however was that I was asked by my bosses “what have you learned from your mistake” to which I responded “never do it again”, The final word from management was “then its money well spent, carry on”.
Prof Robert Sutton in the Harvard Business Review blog (ref*) states:
“Failure is inevitable, so the key to success is to be good at learning from it. The ability to capitalize on hard-won experience is a hallmark of the greatest organizations — [those are] the ones that are most adept at turning knowledge into action, that are best at developing and implementing creative ideas, that engage in evidence-based (rather than faith- or fear-based) management and that are populated with the best bosses.”
He goes on: “Failure sucks but instructs. In fact, there is no learning without failure… Discovery of the moves that work well is always accompanied by discovery of moves that don’t. This is why failure is so endemic to innovation.”
Brenden Boyle IDEO (Global Design Consutancy) is quoted in the same article as saying: “You can’t get any good new ideas without having a lot of dumb, lousy, and crazy ones.”
This is an excellent article and can I suggest you read it in its entirety at: ref* http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/08/forgive_and_remember_how_a_goo.html
Alternatively if you are working in an organization that that doesn’t see honest mistakes as a form of learning perhaps it time to spruce up your resume. There is a free blank resume form at orglearn.org!
Quotes on failure:
“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” Sven Eriksson
“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” Colin Powell
“Failure is the tuition you pay for success.” Walter Brunell
Finally back to the HBR article: All of this positive “failure” experience of course only comes about if we (and our bosses) buy into the idea, again as Prof Sutton puts it, that “failure is a by-product of risk-taking and that honest mistakes will [and should] be forgiven [by the management]“.
