Posts Tagged ‘mistakes’

Black box thinking

Monday, November 2nd, 2015

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?

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Posted in Business Change, Hints, Tips & Techniques, Innovation | No Comments »

Whose mess is it anyway?

Monday, May 25th, 2009

The other day my sister was talking about an embarrassing situation.  This lead to a discussion about when you draw people’s attention to problems that you have found.  What do you do?  Tell them and get involved, or just hope that someone else deals with it?

At work one often comes across problems created by others; if you can’t simply fix them, are you supposed to draw attention to them or pretend you know nothing about them.  Every organisation has a cupboard full of problems that people know about and could be fixed if only they were drawn to the right person’s attention.  The thing that usually happens is that everyone can ignore these issues and hope that someone else deals with them, and your customers end up smelling something isn’t right!

How do you create a culture where mistakes and issues are aired and dealt without wasting time apportioning blame?

“There is luxury in self reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.”  Oscar Wilde

“You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.”   Henry David Thoreau

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Posted in Business Change, General | No Comments »

Adversity

Friday, March 20th, 2009

I was listening to the chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, talking about the lessons he had learnt from adversity.  He was saying that when he stopped asking “Why me?” and changed his question to “What should I learn from this?” he found he could move on in his life.

We all make mistakes; we all have things happen to us that try & challenge us, but many of us get stuck in feeling a victim, or battered by fate.  Asking “What can I learn from this?” is much more empowering response. 

It is not necessarily a case of Life seeking to teach us lessons, but rather creating a space for an inner dialogue which allows our inner voice to speak to us.  Rabbi Sacks felt that he heard God’s voice in this; I think it is okay  to interpret this howsoever works for you.  The power of the process works.

Whether in your personal or business life, take the time to learn from your mistakes.  Of course, if you are smart, you will also learn from the mistakes of others too!  Bon Chance!

“The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.”  Edward Phelps

“If a mistake is not a stepping stone, it is a mistake.”  Eli Siegel

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Posted in Business Change, Personal Change, Values & Philosophy | 2 Comments »

“I got it wrong”

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

I was facilitating a meeting for one of the bigger London councils the other day and one of the expert speakers, an adviser to Downing Street, stood up publically and said “I got it wrong”.  Now we all know that everyone makes mistakes, but I can’t recall the last time I heard an expert admit to such human fallibility. 

The thing is that if we don’t feel that we can admit to getting things wrong, we are doomed to justify and defend our current position, even if it isn’t working for us!  Saying “I got it wrong” is very powerful, very liberating and very hard!

Perhaps today is a good day to practice this art, if only to ourselves….

“In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know, that’s a really good argument, my position is mistaken,” and then they actually change their minds, and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”  Carl Sagan

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Posted in Business Change, Communication, Personal Change | 3 Comments »

Still fiddling…

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Sometimes life imitates art in a way that is truly scary. You know that moment in the horror film where the music changes and the camera angle tells you that something nasty is coming from behind, and you maybe shout at the screen “For God’s sake, don’t go out there!! Look behind you!!” So last night, having taken another, clean back-up of my operating system and programmes configured just the way I like it, I thought “Why don’t I have another go at creating that partition…” I even shelled out for the latest version of the partitioning software. Should have been a doddle; and even if it wasn’t, I could now recover in an hour or so…. [cue the spooky music ….]
This was around 7 pm, about an hour later I knew it wasn’t working. I had clicked something that that was interfering with my MBR file (this is like the front door lock for your computer, and without it you don’t get in.)

The next hour or so was spent restoring my MBR. I managed this okay. But like in the horror movie, each step towards apparent safety lures you deeper and deeper in to the swamp. So my horror story took me via somehow changing the drive letters so that the C drive was now the restore partition and the operating system sat on D. I could handle that …. NO I couldn’t! This meant that my backup software couldn’t now see my drives properly so I couldn’t restore to my safe copy. Around 2 am I decided that I was going to have to restore the machine to delivery condition in order to allow me get a clean disk to restore to. By 4am I knew that the restore partition was corrupted… I went to bed.

Never mind I have a 3 year warranty with those nice Dell people, they will help with the restore then I’ll be fine. So this morning I have spoken to 4 very friendly, very polite Orientals who were very helpful. They explained that due to some dispute about licensing with Microsoft et al that I was not able to get another copy of the delivery image. This is a little like losing you car handbook and Ford telling you that they won’t give you another one. So here I sit 3 hours later, I think I have restored my operating system, but my backup software (which worked perfectly 2 days ago) seems to be taking forever to offer me the chance to restore to my clean system image. [I think that music might be playing in the background round about now…]

I’ll let you know how this gothic tale ends up but the crazy thing is, even if I succeed in being back to where I need to be I still won’t have the partition that I want. Do I try a third time or should I leave well alone. As you settle down with your coke and popcorn, I’m thinking that you must be wondering how dumb one person can be…

PS>> The restore software is now telling me that in only 9 hours I’ll know if I get killed off or am the blood-soaked survivor

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Posted in Gadgets & Technology | 1 Comment »