I listened to a fascinating program today which talked about making and learning from mistakes.  Regular readers will be familiar with my thoughts on the importance of learning from mistakes and avoiding a blame culture.  It is said that the secret to being a successful entrepreneur is to fail often and learn every time you do.  It is a well known truism that if you have never failed then you have never really tried or lived!  Matthew Sayed, author of “Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success” says that in the airline industry, they are committed to investigating and learning from every single mistake so that they never need to happen again.  People’s lives are at risk and any failure is international news, so failure is very costly.  The key is that there is a culture of honest investigation and procedures are modified to make them more robust.  By way of contrast, in medicine it is very hard for a surgeon to say “Oops…I messed up”, so they hide behind the veil of medical complexity and “These things happen”.  Thus no one truly investigates as mistakes are brushed under the carpet.  In politics, policies are stuck to as a sign of strength and vision, and you can’t say, “They are not working, lets try something else”, this is deemed weakness, rather than wisdom.

I ask you, which environment would you sooner work in or be served by?