Seeing Mistakes
Stopping mistakes before they happen is the best solution, but often that isn't possible. You must learn to meet mistakes head-on and deal with them. By recognizing and handling them analytically, you can minimize the damage and maximize the learning.
Mistake Methodology
Mistakes may be an inevitable part of life, but there is no reason to shrug your shoulders and accept the aftermath. You must learn to be prepared to avoid mistakes as often as you can, and, when you can't, accept and learn from them.
Kimon Nicolaides was a brilliant twentieth century artist and teacher who wrote the book The Natural Way to Draw, described by one source as the best-written how-to on any subject. Nicolaides wrote, “The sooner you make your first 5,000 mistakes, the sooner you will be able to correct them.”
However, nothing says that you have to be inefficient in dealing with mistakes. You can take a methodical approach to see what went wrong, fix things, and avoid similar problems in the future:
Identify the problem
Analyze the mistake
Develop and implement a correction
Develop an alternative approach
You will learn to find out what went wrong, fix the problem as best you can, determine how you could have avoided the situation, and learn how to recognize it in advance next time. The first step? Know what happened.
Identify the Problem
The first step in dealing with a problem is knowing that it exists. Although you might think this is simple, it's not. To know something is wrong, you have to be able to see it, and there are factors that can keep you from doing so.
The problem facing you may be subtle and you might not grasp its ramifications. Someone on the team who made a mistake might be hiding it out of fear or embarrassment. Effects of the problem could be removed in time from the cause, like the error in an auto assembly line that doesn't become obvious until months later, when someone buys the car and puts it to use. People responsible for noticing a problem may have fallen asleep at the switch, or you and others could be so invested in success that none of you pulls back enough to accurately judge the effects of your actions. Your team must proceed to achieve its goals with enthusiasm and a certain degree of watchfulness. Keep an eye on the metrics you create for signs that something is off course.
One of the most important skills a doctor can develop is good diagnostic ability. So many disorders have similar symptoms that determining what ails a person can be difficult. The physician must learn the subtle differences that indicate a patient has one illness and not another.
Analyze the Mistake
Knowing that you or someone on the team made a mistake is one thing; understanding how it happened is another. You are sorting through the difference between what happened and how it happened. The former is recognizing the problem, not its cause. A problem might have multiple causes. You'd want to know whether a factory product broke because of the user's treatment of the equipment, a design flaw, the factory worker's improper technique, or a substandard part.
In your efforts as a leader, a problem could be as obvious as a physical aberration. However, chances are that you are looking at an activity, not an entity, that went awry. The cause might be systemic — the result of a procedure or flow of communication that is unsound. But you're dealing with the work of people, and there's as good a possibility that the source is psychological in nature. Think of how many people you know who couldn't see their own weaknesses — or, perhaps, you've found yourself in that situation, causing a problem because you forgot about some quirk in your character that trips you up.
According to experts in statistical quality control, most problems are systemic in nature: Someone made a mistake in the design of a policy or procedure. As a leader, that generally means that any problem is the fault of the organization, and a solution will take the cooperation of the entire team.
At times, you will have to deal with human weakness. To uncover this type of problem, you must be ruthless and unflinching while remaining kind. Because we're such complex creatures, you can't assume that Rudy or Phyllis could never do something like what you see. It may be highly unlikely, but don't write off the possibility. Kindness lets you search for the source of the mistake without scaring everyone so much that they go into hiding.
