#21 The Good, Bad & Ugly of Managing Mistakes at Work

THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU HEAR

• “We all make mistakes. Let’s move on. Forgive and forget!”
• “It’s OK to make mistakes! Part of being human!”
• “Mistakes are how we learn, right?”
• “It was just a mistake….why can’t you just let it go? Haven’t you made a mistake before?”
• “I have a confession to make. I’m sorry I didn’t dare tell you earlier…”

…you’re in the Good, Bad & Ugly of Managing Mistakes at work.

THINK // 3 insights from the field

?? THE GOOD THING is there is a general acceptance that making mistakes is part of the problem of being a human being: we are not omniscient Gods, we are imperfect beings with limited self-awareness and imperfect situational knowledge.

The Johari’s Window framework helps you see why mistakes will keep happening to all of us sooner or later:

• we have a Blind Area: some things are known to others but are kept unknown to us as long as feedback is not given. We may make mistakes and not have people let us know about our blindspots so we keep making the same mistakes again and again.
• we have a Hidden Area: there are vulnerabilities we know we have but we keep hidden and unknown from others. We may try to mitigate and solve things on our own - only to keep bumbling and making more mistakes along the way.
• we all have an Unknown Area: this is the “fog of war” of surprising things unknown to ourselves and unknown to others. We make mistakes that we did not know were mistakes until they blew up in our face somehow.

In general, Johari’s Window also shows us that while we cannot eliminate mistake-making from our lives, we can all help each other grow and learn through our mistakes.

We do this by expanding the “Open Area”, making more things known to ourselves and to others:

• To decrease our Blind Area, we can practice Clear + Kind Feedback: if we establish psychological safety in our workteams, we can offer clear + kind feedback about our blindspots in a way that still affirms each others’ capacity to do something about our mistakes.
• To decrease our Hidden Area, we can practice Self-Disclosure: there are workplace vulnerabilities that we can share so team-mates or leaders can support us to do better. It may be better to wave a white flag for help before your growing pile of mistakes defeats you and engulfs the team.
• To decrease the Unknown Area, we can practice Self Discovery and Shared Discovery: we cannot ever eliminate the “fog of war” but we can certainly keep a useful habit of curiosity and collaborative learning. A team can be a great learning environments because everybody looks at things so differently and are intrinsically drawn to explore different things you may never have dreamt of looking at.

?? THE BAD THING is people may be uncomfortable with confronting difficult mistakes and may try to smooth over the tensions with unhelpful thought-terminating cliches that treat all mistakes as equally forgiveable.

Thought terminating cliches are a form of simplified loaded language that are used to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance.        

When mistakes are made, these are some thought-terminating statements we commonly use to soothe themselves or others:

• “We all make mistakes. Let’s move on."
• "Forgive and forget!”
• "It’s OK to make mistakes! We’re all human.”
• “Mistakes are how we learn!”

Those statements aren’t wrong. They may even be offered sincerely in the spirit of encouragement and empathy.

The problem is they paint an incomplete picture of what happened.

And they terminate further discussion and clearer thinking through of different aspects of the mistake made.

If the whole point of making mistakes is to grow and learn from them (expanding the “Open Area” and decreasing the Hidden, Blind and Unknown Areas), we must not quickly quell uncomfortable discussion about how mistakes were made.

When a mistake is made, use the moment to help people distinguish between what are good, bad and ugly mistakes so they can better decide for themselves what are next steps moving forward.

1. GOOD MISTAKES

To some extent, these are intended and expected mistakes. They are what Professor Amy Edmondson’s “The Fearless Organisation“ calls Intelligent failures. These can be:

• mistakes that happen while we were on a risky path of intentional discovery and exploration into new territory.
• mistakes made while we were taking risks exploring something mission-critical. AND we had done some preliminary communication about our assumptions, what assumptions we were testing and the risks we were taking
• mistakes caused by unsuccessful trials which had a substantial cost but yielded highly valuable and highly informative lessons that the organisation intended to learn.

Example of Good Mistake:

a team tests a new version of an app that the whole organisation thought would succeed - but nobody used it.?

Honour Good Mistakes

Review the intentions. Consolidate the learnings. Share the rich harvest of hard lessons with fellow explorers. Apply the lessons to the next thing.

2. “BAD” MISTAKES

These are clearly unintended mistakes. They are what Professor Edmondson’s “The Fearless Organisation“ calls

• Simple/Preventable failures: a failure caused by deviating from a known process. This is a situation where we knew how to do things right, the best practices and processes are obvious enough to most of us - and yet we didn’t do it. The error is human but involves behaviours that must be corrected such as laziness, entitlement, or a reluctance to follow instructions.Example of Simple/Preventable failure: someone forgot to run tests?and the app crashed.?Review + Minimise Simple Preventable Failures: apologise and repair any relationship damage + create process-oriented checklists + take action to do those best practices
• Complex failures: are failures that occur because a peculiar combination of needs, people and problems came together in a new way. Mistakes were made but it is difficult to assign responsibility given the multiple players and factors involved. Our wisdom of how we could have done better is only revealed to us in retrospect.
• “Complex failures occur when we have good knowledge about what needs to be done. We have processes and protocols, but a combination of internal and external factors come together in a way to produce a failure outcome. These kinds of failures happen all the time in hospital care, for example, where there’s enough volatility or complexity in the environment that things just happen.” (Edmonson)
• Example of Complex failure: mistakes made with patients while staff were triaging them in an overtaxed hospital Emergency Room; mistakes made with launching a new technological product while running a fast-growing startup.
• Review + Relearn from Complex Failures: apologise and repair any relationship damage + After-Action-Review the complex failure + take stock of hard lessons andTest-Sense-Review emergent practices

3. UGLY MISTAKES

These are ‘mistakes’ that reveal such ugliness of human behaviour that they cannot be euphemised as mistakes but outrageous moral failures.

There are darker behaviours that make ‘mistakes’ so grievous that it plunges all people involved into a Chaotic space with extremely high levels of situational uncertainty and relational disagreement. People who were damaged by such “mistakes” would feel moral injury and institutional betrayal from hearing it labelled that way by perpetrators, bystanders or leaders in the workplace. Ugly mistakes would theoretically be possible for all people to do but would not be seen as so common that they are considered easily forgiveable. People that enable, support, deny or encourage any such behaviours would be generally considered by outsiders or unrelated insiders as unhealthy and/or in denial.

Example of Ugly Mistakes:

Think of any behaviours that would potentially trigger outrage - if it happened to you or somebody you cared for - and if the behaviours were then casually brushed over as “just mistakes”: Sexual harassment. Violence. Abusive language. Threatening behaviour. Stealing. Lying. Cheating. Manipulation. Bullying.

Act Decisively with Ugly Mistakes

The right response in Chaos is firm, decisive action. In many workplace cases surrounding “ugly mistakes”, the firm action is usually swift dismissal - and immediate triage to repair any deep relational damage and institutional damage done.

?? THE UGLY THING about managing mistakes made is you may see ugly behaviour emerge along the way. Simple Mistakes may be blown out of proportion. Bad Mistakes and even Ugly Mistakes may be so managed or minimised that nobody seems to be learning.

In teams with low psychological safety:

• Intelligent Failures, Good Mistakes, are not celebrated and honoured for everybody to grow and learn from.
• Simple Preventable Failures made between people who don’t get along could be accompanied with outsized moral outrage as if an Ugly Mistake was made.
• Complex Failures could be treated like Simple Preventable Failures in a team that feels too scared or distrusting to talk about a systemic overview of what went wrong. They don’t want to be held accountable for what they feelis not their direct problem, or a problem that they consider way out of their control.

Another ugly thing you might see is: When ugly mistakes happen, many will look away. Unfortunately, it is predictable and all too common to see perpetrators of ugly behaviour get away with it in unhealthy organisations or teams with selective psychological safety (high for insiders, low for outsiders)

Perpetrators, especially powerful ones, will usually be the first to try to euphemise whatever ugly behaviours they engaged in as forgiveable “mistakes”. Shockingly, they may even try to reposition their ugly mistakes as “good mistakes” that helped them “grow and learn so much”.

Such repositioning of “ugly mistakes” as merely “bad mistakes” or even “good mistakes” can attract surprising support from bystanders.

To understand why it is crucial for all organisational leaders to make sure they do not inevitably work with perpetrators to euphemise ugly mistakes away, consider psychologist Judith Herman’s searing opening chapter of her landmark book, Trauma and Recovery:

“…When the events are (Acts of God), those who bear witness sympathise readily with the victim. But when the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides. It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear and speak no evil. The victim on the contrary asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement and remembering. …In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defence. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens…. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: It never happened The victim lies The victim exaggerates The victim brought it upon herself It is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail. The perpetrator’s arguments prove irresistible when the bystander faces them in isolation. Without the supportive social environment, the bystander usually succumbs to the temptation to look the other way. This is true even when the victim is an idealised and valued member of society. Soldiers in every war, even those who have been regarded as heroes, complain bitterly that no one wants to know the real truth about war…To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins victim and witness in a common alliance. For the individual victim, this social context is created by relationships... For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered.”

FEEL // 2 links to help you feel less alone

WATCH our 2-part podcast episode Facilitate Well-being at Work where I talk to my CG team as well as Lye Yen Kai, founder of Pivotal Learning, about practical tips on how we can create psychological safety for each other to talk more openly about mistakes we make at work.

DO // 1 strategy to try this week

The next time you see a mistake being made at work:

NOTICE TO RESPOND APPROPRIATELY:

What kind of mistake is this?

• good mistake: worthy of reviewing, celebrating for our courage to explore and sharing of hard-won lessons?
• bad mistake: simple and preventable failure or more complex failure that we must apologise, review and relearn from?
• ugly mistake: involving morally egregious behaviour we must do something decisively about?

SUPPORT APOLOGIES:

If you have to Apologise or support someone’s ability to apologise:

Own, Repair, Improve.

• “I (did this wrong thing). I’m sorry I (hurt this person). I ( will do reparative action Z).”
• e.g. "I did not submit the pitch on time. I'm sorry I let all of you who worked so hard on the pitch down. I will work with you all to communicate more and get better at estimating timelines."

If you have to support someone’s ability to accept the apology: Thank, Acknowledge, Accept.

• “Thank you for (owning you did this wrong thing). I hear (you are sorry for causing this specific hurt). I accept (you will be doing the reparative actions).”
• e.g. "Thank you for being truthful about not submitting the pitch on time. I hear you that you feel sorry for what you did to the team - we really busted our ass on that and it's still hard to get over. I accept you will be working on your communication and time management issues for the next pitch."

SUPPORT ACCOUNTABILITY:

A healthy boundary-resetting conversation requires:

This is NOT OK behaviour + This is the MORE OK behaviour + Why it matters (Values)

• e.g. “It was not OK that you kept your struggles over time to yourself knowing already that it might affect the submission. It would have been better if you let us know as early as possible that you needed more help or let us know you were underprepared for that kind of work. This matters because I value honest communication and caring for the impact of our individual behaviour on the rest of our team-mates.

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