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The art of making good mistakes

Neither organisations nor people can learn from their errors if they deny mistakes ever happened

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    • A culture in which we learn from failure requires both an atmosphere in which people can speak out, and an analytical framework that can discern the difference between what works and what doesn’t.
    • A culture in which we learn from failure requires both an atmosphere in which people can speak out, and an analytical framework that can discern the difference between what works and what doesn’t. PHOTO: PIXABAY

    Tim Harford

    Published Fri, Sep 15, 2023 · 03:30 PM

    DO GOOD teams make fewer mistakes? It seems a reasonable hypothesis. But in the early 1990s, when a young researcher looked at evidence from medical teams at two Massachusetts hospitals, the numbers told her a completely different story: the teams who displayed the best teamwork were the ones making the most mistakes. What on earth was going on?

    The researcher’s name was Amy Edmondson and, 30 years after that original puzzle, her new book Right Kind of Wrong unpicks a morass of confusion, contradiction and glib happy talk about the joys of failure.

    She solved the puzzle soon enough. The best teams didn’t make more errors; they admitted more to making errors. Dysfunctional teams admitted to very few, for the simple reason that nobody on those teams felt safe owning up.

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