Good mistakes vs Bad mistakes

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time:  4 mins

Summary: 'A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new' Albert Einstein.

• IMO not all mistakes are bad; in fact I think some aren’t just good, but healthy and should be publicly celebrated! 

• Mistakes that break new ground should be celebrated.

• Jingle: When should mistakes be celebrated? When should mistakes be excoriated? 

Magnitudes of mistakes

• Whether a mistake is good or bad depends on 1) whether you’ve done the work before and 2) whether the mistake is foreseeable. 

• -L2: Have done before AND make mistake. No excuses = excoriation. You get exactly the behaviour you allow. You do not allow this. 

  • For example, in a previous round of hiring you took too long to respond to a top-quality candidate and another company hired them by the time you made them an offer, then in another round of hiring you make the same mistake.

• -L1: Have not done before BUT a foreseeable mistake. Not good. Get the person to write a ‘post mortem’ about learnings. 

  • For example, you make a plan to figure out resourcing for a build and you forget to factor in the team’s Christmas leave – you haven’t done this task before but it’s a basic mistake that should have been foreseen.

• L0: Have not done before AND not foreseeable mistake BUT someone else points out the mistake. 

  • If you are doing ‘knowledge work’ mistakes are often not ‘clear’. This isn’t ‘I crashed the car and no one could reasonably not know’. This is ‘I’ve just realised I’ve been beating my head against the wall for 3 months and didn’t know’. As an example ‘ahh crap, our onboarding has the ‘activation a-ha moment’ in step 4 but we can put it in step 2. Why have we been optimising getting a higher percentage of people to step 4 when we should have just removed 2 steps?’ However someone else points this out to you, you don’t see it yourself. 

• L1: Have not done before AND not foreseeable mistake AND you personally find the mistake. You get exactly the behaviour you celebrate. Tell others about the way to improve. 

  • In the previous example you find the way to improve (aka ‘mistake’) instead of someone else pointing it out. 

  • Another example: in many places you need to have quality assurance processes. However for a while quality assurance was just ‘finding bugs’ and not also ‘celebrating something cool’. To me no one is perfect, there is almost always a bug or two, but there is also almost always something cool to celebrate. Consciously celebrate cool unless you want to be a fool.

  • I didn’t get consciously celebrating a unit of cool 5 years ago.  

Mistakes vs Ways to improve

• I think mistakes are tainted with a bad wrap. 

• ‘Doing something new’ vs ‘Learning something already known’. 

  • In secondary education you are almost always ‘learning something already known’ like ‘maths’. Getting anything wrong is a ‘mistake’ and normally seen as bad. 

  • When you are doing something new… you don’t know what to do! Getting good at seeing ‘mistakes’ is also known as getting good at finding ‘ways to improve’. 

• However I’ve found that often when you figure something out it feels ‘obvious’ in hindsight and as such it feels like a ‘mistake’ and something one should be ashamed of. 

  • IMO it’s shameful to think of all ‘ways to improve’ as ‘mistakes’. IMO it’s stupid not to be ashamed of some mistakes. 

  • Don’t be stupidly ashamed… stupify people with your ability to improve!

  • ALL mistakes should be openly acknowledged whether or not they are ‘bad’ or ‘good’ – hiding a mistake because you’re ashamed is actively harmful. Bad mistakes aren’t good but we are all human!

• Thinking all mistakes are a mistake is a mistake… did somebody say steak? 

Progress = Doing something new + Removing ‘mistakes’ 

• IMO things get better by adding upside (doing something new) and by removing downside (finding ‘mistakes’). 

• “The first draft of anything is shit.”― Ernest Hemingway

  • Things get better by adding gold and removing sh1t. Ha! 

  • If you think your sh1t don’t stink… you stink like sh1t. Haha. I am mature. 

• IMO don’t be ashamed of finding downside you can remove. I try to spend as much time looking for downside I can remove as I spend finding new ways to add upside.  There is an upside to removing downside!

• I try to celebrate breakthroughs from either adding upside or removing downside. 

• I care about progress, not where it comes from. 

  • “It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” Deng XiaoPing. 

  • Deng you are a hero, we miss you. Xi JinPing, you are a piece of poo. 

• IMO if you don’t publicly celebrate removing downside then people don’t look for it as much as they should. If you don’t remove downside (ie poo) then you might have a sh1t company? 

• Ok enough poo jokes. Also, enough writing for today. I’m not exactly sure when this will go out but I hope everyone has survived COVID 2020 ok. All else equal, for myself, at a macro point of view 2020 has been a success… but at a micro level, god it has also been a mess!