The Cover-up is Worse Than the Mistake

Mistakes are unavoidable but covering them up is not. Mistakes are part of life. Everyone screws up. It’s not about eliminating mistakes. Instead, it’s ensuring they don’t get buried. Mistakes are valuable when they are embraced, but destructive when ignored. ??

Admitting mistakes is tough. Even in the NFL, where you’d think given the high expectations that mistakes would be freely admitted, you witness mistake suppression. Michael Lombardi, author of Gridiron Genius: A Master Class in Building Teams and Winning at the Highest Level, describes the idea of “scouting blinders,” where scouts fail to admit when they’ve made a mistake on a player:

The second destructive form of bias we see all the time in NFL team building is “scouting blinders”: whenever drafted players are kept around long after it has become obvious that the evaluation that got them where they are was dead wrong. Like many crimes, the cover-up is even worse than the initial mistake.

While it’s embarrassing to admit a mistake, it’s madness to pretend like they don’t exist. Not only do the mistakes then continue unimpeded, but organizations double-down on the foolishness by continuing to invest in the same bad hires, bad projects, bad acquisitions, and bad investments.

How do we move from ignoring and covering up mistakes to embracing and facing them?

In Ozan Varol’s book, Thinking Like a Rocket Scientist, Ed Catmull, former President of Pixar, explains how we don’t always control failure, but we always control how we respond to it:

There are two parts to failure. There is the event itself, with all its attendant disappointment, confusion, and shame, and then there is our reaction to it. We don’t control the first part, but we do control the second. The goal, as Catmull puts it, should be to uncouple fear and failure—to create an environment in which making mistakes doesn’t strike terror into your employees’ hearts.

Ray Dalio, founder of the investment firm Bridgewater, reinforces the point:

Don’t hide your mistakes and pretend you’re perfect. Find your imperfections and deal with them. You will either learn valuable lessons from your mistakes and press on or you won’t and will fail.

Dalio goes one step further and advocates for the systematic recording and discussion of errors, so the learning is never lost:

Create an error log to record your mistakes and bad outcomes so they can be discussed and addressed systematically.

Coverups indicate bigger problems. First, it reveals bigger cultural and organizational issues. Cover-ups indicate a complete lack of trust. If you can’t admit mistakes, what else are you not discussing? Where else is intellectual dishonesty occurring? What else is being ignored that’s growing into a bigger problem by the day?

Second, mistakes are inseparable from the learning process. Companies that don’t learn can’t compete. As in sports, coaches use mistakes to correct technique and behavior. You can’t learn from what you hide.

Third, cover-ups induce risk aversion. What’s the best way to avoid mistakes? Don’t suggest new ideas. Don’t push back against the status quo. Follow the existing rules. Don’t suggest innovations or projects that might fail. Do what everyone else is doing.

How many organizations have you worked for where errors were brought to the surface so they could be studied and thoroughly discussed? For most readers, it’s zero, because acknowledging errors and mistakes would destroy the egos and the perfect narratives so many organizations rely on.

Ozan Varol shares the work of Amy Edmondson, a researcher who studied mistakes in the health care industry:

Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, wanted to explore the cause of these medication errors. She asked herself, “Do better hospital teams make fewer medication mistakes?” To Edmondson, the answer seemed obvious. Better teams, with better-performing members and leaders, should make fewer errors. But the results were the exact opposite. Better teams were making more mistakes, not less. What could explain this counterintuitive outcome?

Edmondson decided to dig deeper, sending a research assistant into the wild to observe the teams on the hospital floor. The assistant discovered that better teams weren’t making more mistakes. Instead, they were simply reporting more mistakes. The teams that had a climate of openness—where the staff felt safe to discuss mistakes—performed better because employees were more willing to share failures and actively work to reduce them.

The key, as Edmondson found, isn’t always preventing mistakes, it’s ensuring that they are reported. A lack of mistakes usually means they are being covered up, not that they are not occurring.

The best thing a leader can do is to normalize the error reporting process. Sure, errors due to laziness or apathy usually deserve the resultant punishment. But errors of ambition and innovation should be celebrated as a necessary factor of success.

As soon as you start punishing well-intentioned errors, you’ve ensured mediocrity across your organization. ?