Making Mistakes

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Making Mistakes

February 18, 2009. By Peter Lloyd

No matter how many times a trainer yells, "Keep your guard up!" it never really sinks in until the first time a boxer gets punched in the nose. With that in mind, what should you do when someone under you makes a mistake? Make them pay for it?

If it's a supplier, maybe. Otherwise, they never get the bloody-nose effect. And it's just good business to demand quality. But if it's an employee, no.

You definitely want to discourage laziness and carelessness, but you also want to encourage experimentation and risk taking. In that case, there's nothing wrong with honest mistakes, unless you keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

You can make the most of mistakes by learning what not to do again. Scientists look at mistakes as steps. The most valuable part of the process of elimination. Identifying the dead ends.

But don't forget to look for the unexpected wonders mistakes are famous for. The book Serendipity: Accidental discoveries in science by Royston M. Roberts devotes more than 250 pages to the subject.

The most creative people in your organization will be the ones who make the most mistakes. One way to encourage innovation is to allow for and even reward error.

And if you're really serious about developing a creative culture, you might want to tell your people, "If you're not making mistakes, you're just not trying hard enough."

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest business problems.

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