08.
You Are Going to Make Mistakes

Safe Failure Develops Irreplaceable Judgment

Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, defines three types of errors:

1. Avoidable mistakes: errors we should not be making and need to immediately avoid making
2. Complex mistakes: when life contrives to feel like a 'perfect storm' that's hard to replicate. We learn from these errors by planning for these new edge cases we now know exist
3. Intelligent mistakes: 'errors' that feel like wins because they evolve our understanding of our work, making us smarter

Mistakes are not your enemy, you just feel out of control when other people make them. Feeling out of control when your name is above the door is too vulnerable for many owners.

"Change is inevitable; progress is optional"

— John Maxwell

You are going to make mistakes. Your employees are going to make mistakes. You need to be comfortable giving critical feedback when avoidable mistakes are made (they cannot be repeated); you need to be patient when complex errors are made (your team needs your trust to learn); you need to encourage intelligent mistakes (better to learn in the safety of a company that learns than to have intelligent mistakes present as avoidable ones because people were afraid to speak up when they spotted an iceberg)

"The only thing worse than a bad decision is no decision"

— Theodore Roosevelt

Encouraging your team to take action bravely, without having all the information is how people learn. A huge double advantage forms when you trust your people to learn by doing:

1. You develop employees' ability to feel a sense of control in their work, that makes them feel valuable and useful. They see themselves as important team players, not just a replaceable body
2. Over time you develop a saleable asset — your company is filled with people who can think for themselves without you needing to be the company brain. You document processes and build intellectual property that both alleviates the pressure from your shoulders and, if you choose to sell, creates a more desirable asset to a would-be buyer

"Realising that the individual employees want to do the right thing, but often are forced by the system into the wrong behavior, has profound managerial implications."

— Simple_Complexity by William Donaldson

Your people want to be useful, they want to do the right thing. They want to feel a sense of meaning in their lives, to be part of a group that does good work and is always learning. You encourage learning by accepting (most importantly, by communicating to your team that) mistakes are going to happen, and that we need to sort which types of mistake we can tolerate and even encourage.

"Learning must take place from the bottom up. You cannot force learning. Your employees have to learn for themselves, and you must provide the environment for them to do so."

— Simple_Complexity by William Donaldson

You should want your team to be filled with life-long learners. Start by learning yourself that not all mistakes are bad.