We’ve all heard the saying - learn from your mistakes and don’t be afraid to fail.
But how often do you stop and think about what that actually means for you and your team? Has it affected your behavior in any way? How does your organization see this?
Nobody aims for failure, yes. But when it inevitably happens, what lessons do we actually learn from the experience? More specifically, how do we learn from them? More often than not, we try to draw the wrong lessons from our mistakes because we concentrate solely on analyzing the wrong things.
Are you analyzing your failures? Or how to succeed?
“Just little bits of history repeating”, as heard in one of Propellerheads’ songs. To prevent repeating failures, it's crucial to learn from our mistakes. If something goes wrong, organizing a separate root cause analysis session, post-mortem, or similar exercise is necessary. These sessions help us analyze in detail everything that led to the failure so that we can avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
The intention behind this approach is good. But does it actually work? Is it actually useful?
To that, I say no. What is find is that drawing useful lessons from history is difficult due to their complexity. The circumstances of each situation differs, and what may seem clear in hindsight may not have been that way at the time of the event, even if it was possible to take everything into account.
In reality, the exact same disasters will likely never happen again - with or without analysis sessions and detailed reports. Yet when the similar ones do occur, we fail to prevent them. In the end, we just end up repeating history after all. Not the mistakes, but the analysis and reporting part we dutifully run, time and time again. We are nurturing a false sense of security and assuming we can track every cause and effect there is .
Is learning from these mistakes just waste of time then? Not necessarily, no. But we need to concentrate on what decisions were made and why, as well as what’s needed to succeed; not what caused the mistake.
How we survived from our worst season ever
Back when I was a skater in a synchronized skating team, there was one season my team remembered particularly well. But not for the reasons you might be expecting. In the previous season, we achieved a lot and it was spectacular in many ways. Naturally our expectations were high, and we were ready to achieve even greater results. But throughout the season, we steadily navigated from one disappointing competition to another.
Why? Did we just suddenly lose our talent or ambition? Hardly. Just like the earlier story of success I mentioned before, the failure following it was a sum of many parts. Yet somehow our successes rarely spark the same need for analysis like failures do.
As psychologist Daniel Kahneman has explained, ‘regression to the mean’ bias refers to the tendency for extreme or unusual events to be followed by more typical or average events. Our minds tend to overemphasize the role of skill or other factors in the exceptional performance, and we may assume that the subsequent drop in performance is the result of a failure or problem. We did think there was a problem, and this is what we learned from it:
- The first (and most important) lesson we learned was that we simply lacked faith in what we were performing. We didn’t have a clear vision of what it was supposed to be and struggled to understand it from the beginning - continuously trying to make it work by solving every problem we encountered.
- In the workplace, analyzing the causes and effects of a failure can lead to blame and shame. Our team encountered disappointments, yes, but we didn’t attempt to attribute responsibility. Rather, we persevered and found strength in our unity, sharing laughter and tears, and experiencing success and failure as a team.
- Lastly, we moved on from the past and looked to the future - always prepping for the upcoming season. The disaster itself now lives as a legendary story and rests in our memories far more powerfully than any reports ever could.
What should you concentrate on the next time you fail?
There's a difference between learning from your past and analyzing your mistakes. The 'lessons learned' should provide insights for your future endeavors. If your failures make you overly cautious and cause you to scrutinize every possible pitfall in advance, then you're doing it wrong. This approach is more likely to hinder your success than help it. As the aforementioned Propellerheads song put it: Why ask your head? It's your hips that are swinging!
So why not follow suit and swing with these tips?
- Inevitably, things will often be intricate. The circumstances are likely to differ each time, with only certain cause-and-effect chains becoming apparent in hindsight—not to mention that it's improbable to account for every variable.
- To ensure success, it's important to concentrate on the factors that matter and comprehend why they are significant. Avoid attributing blame, as everyone acts with good intentions.
- Learn to be accountable as a team. Stick together and be loyal to each other.
- If you find yourself stuck, consider changing direction. If you cannot envision the final outcome despite your best efforts and attempts, then it's likely that your efforts will not yield success.
- Archaeology is the best way to explore the mysteries of the past, so it's best to leave it to the experts. Instead, let's concentrate on moving forward.
Consider this: if groups of moody teenagers can handle major letdowns constructively, so can you!
Published: Jun 21, 2023
