How accepting and managing errors can raise a firm's performance

MAKING mistakes and learning from them is integral to human culture. It is what made us successful as a species.

Our development is a repeated story of trying to do something new, making mistakes and then - crucially - trying to improve.

And history has given us countless quotes from the great and good on the creative potential unleashed by making mistakes. For example: "All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes," an insight attributed to Winston Churchill. "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing," said George Bernard Shaw, while fellow Irish writer James Joyce described mistakes as "the portals of discovery". Prolific American inventor Thomas Edison, regarded as the father or modern innovation, is quoted as saying: "I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that do not work."