Learning From Mistakes

How often have we heard  people saying, “We live and learn”, “Mistakes are the stepping stones to learning”, “If you haven’t made mistakes, you’ve probably never tried anything new”, and so on?

Are we as a community giving ourselves the perennial licence to make mistakes? Are we becoming so conditioned to forgive and forget that we have come to accept a myriad mistakes, patiently waiting for someone to get it right?

To me, a system that thrives only on trial and error isn’t a system that is ready to be unleashed into the marketplace. It is an anti-thesis of  the concept of excellence. Trial and error belong to the laboratory, not to unsuspecting customers. Would you risk flying on an airline that promises 99.9 per cent safety standards (which essentially mean one in every thousand flights may crash)?!!

While most businesses may not carry a life-and-death tag, the frequency and impunity with which mistakes are committed spurs one to stop and think why this is so. I think we still live in a state of denial, do not listen to instruction or feedback seriously, and suffer from a lack of personal accountability.

At a reputed restaurant the other day, my wife and I ordered just one main course each. Mine arrived in fifteen minutes and hers did not appear before half an hour had passed and we had put in complaints with the manager. By then my order had turned cold, and both our tempers were sizzling. After all, we’d gone out to have lunch together! Was this a case of ignoring customer expectations? Surely, a branded restaurant ought to have enough SOPs in place to take care of this simple unstated requirement. It could have been the waiter’s inability to communicate properly to the kitchen or the chef’s inability to catch and correlate the order.

A wise senior colleague used to say that business is always at the mercy of communications. Most mistakes occur because the right cues are not given, or a message is not comprehended. Non-communication also gives rise to misinterpretations.

In a hyper-communicative age, bad communicators get more easily found out. Over social media, irrelevance, rudeness, insensitivity, ineptness or disinterest show up. Only the conscious and conscientious seek to learn from them, being more aware, more receptive to feedback and having made the effort to improve.

Self-learning is like riding a bicycle: you keep falling off till you learn to balance. However, when your actions affect others, things get more critical. Mistakes maybe a fact of  life, but the ones that should not be repeated are the high-stake ones.

In my long career in advertising and branding, I remember working as a junior with a highly risk-averse manager, who trusted only himself in challenging times. Whenever things went wrong, he would hold an inquiry to apportion blame. Any organisational setback would set-off an introspection on others’ roles that were not performed.

I also remember another boss who on certain accounts allowed us to experiment and fail. That gave us confidence to take risks and come up with path-breaking work. The energising force of climbing new heights overcame the fear of  “looking down”. No brownie points for guessing who was more fun to work with.

True learning from mistakes happen when you:

1) Concede that you made a mistake, bury your ego and accept responsibility;
2) Comfort whoever you caused pain or loss to;
3) Collaborate with those who can help overcome the problem;
4) Convert the reverse to a win, through planning and effort.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it! And as self-respecting colleagues or customers, we would peter out if we allowed repeaters to drag down our standards.