I posted the following this morning as a comment to Michael Schrage’s HBR post entitled, “The Failure of Failure“:
Michael, you bring up some very provocative points in this piece.
One issue with disasters as learning events is that the deep level of focus on the exact sequence of events, while it performs a useful service (explaining the unexplainable & contributing to closure on behalf of victims & loved ones), is not that helpful for ongoing learning.
A disaster (brutal summary coming) is a chain of unlikely events occuring in sequence and causing a clearly terrible outcome.
The opposite scenario also occurs, with similar frequency–we call it a rousing success (exhibit A: Microsoft in the 1990s).
The issue with both scenarios with respect to learning is this: knowing the precise chain of actions & avoiding it (in the disaster case) or replicating it (in the MS case) actually obscures the much larger number of more basic lessons that help prevent failure or contribute to success.
For those reasons I prefer to look to mistakes rather than failures as learning situations. Mistakes are things people do that, upon reflection, they would do differently, given the chance.
Mistakes occur amid failure and success (& even in everyday plugging along). They don’t have the high profile of “failures,” yet the lessons can be more fundamental & useful. Mistake learning scales up & down–from ground level to the executive suite. And mistakes are ubiquitous. We all make them & can learn from them.
So, I’d propose this. Let’s shift the focus from learning from failure to learning from mistakes. We’ll all be a lot better off.
Related post:
Lessons learned from the Mistake Bank
