For individuals and businesses, mistakes are – generally – a good thing.
I would admit that in certain professions though, mistakes are not desirable. It’s probably not a good idea for pilots, surgeons (and so on) to simply accept mistakes as beneficial. I get that.
However, in most walks of life, failing (making mistakes) is both inevitable and useful.
I consider mistakes a building block of learning. And I often find myself pondering when it was that people lost the fun in the magic of iteration. In the search of immediate perfection, we forgo immediate utility.
Most of the time, a fear of failure is what holds people back. Because organisations are made of people, this also applies to companies. Examples are everywhere.
Probably, this attitude is a legacy of an antiquated (and half broken) educational system where mistakes are penalised, rather than celebrated as an opportunity for learning. Real life is different!
Fail often, fail fast, learn from mistakes, iterate, improve. It’s this thought process that leads to actions that better us as individuals and, by extension, better the world around us (eg our family, our relationships, our company, our social group).
Mistakes are infact something that we should encourage, not punish. We must try many things that don’t work in order to be able to find the one thing that does.
As an individual, when you fail, learn and come back up, you are practicing self-reliance and resourcefulness. You are building confidence and this will serve you well in your career and in your personal life.
Experimentation is the mother of innovation: this is an indisputable law… and one thing that we know about experiments is that lots of them don’t work.
By definition, if you know that something it’s going to work for sure, then it’s not an experiment. Many years ago, when I was about to complete my University degree cycle, one of my professors told me: “We may do a lot of research around one topic, go nowhere and discover that we were using the wrong approach. That’s fine, because that’s an absolutely acceptable outcome of research”.
Naval explains it best in a concise way:
In science, and in evolution, it exactly works that way.
As adults, and as leaders in organisations or social groups, the only failure we should avoid is the one that completely wipes us out, the “catastrophic outcome” in the words of Nassim Taleb. It’s unlikely that a lot of small failures, assuming that we learn and improve thanks to those, will ever lead us to catastrophic ending.
This approach, combined with the right growth attitude and consistency, will do wonders for both individuals and businesses.
As I conclude this note, I can’t help but noticing that many organisations still confuse experimentation with operational excellence. These are two different concepts.
We don’t intend to seek failure at operational excellence (ie at something that we know exactly how it works and we have done many times before), but we should actively seek failure in innovation, experiments and untouched challenges (ie something that was never done before, either at scale or at all).
This framework should protect us from the undesirable catastrophic scenario without stifling progress and forward-looking behaviours.
In essence, be in love with the process of making mistakes so to harness their power.
Learn and grow continuously because the real failure is ‘not trying’.