Editor's Note: Today's Cafe Classic - one of Jim Brennan's best on the important (if sometimes excruciating) lessons our mistakes can teach us - was first published on January 20, 2011.
Enjoy!!
If you are not making mistakes, you aren't doing anything important. You probably aren't learning anything, either, if everything you do is done perfectly every single time. Learning is a process of trial and error. No trial, no error, no learning.
The importance of mistakes is undeniable. You can read Peter Drucker on the subject or you can listen to John Cleese give his classic speech on The Importance of Mistakes.
Personally, I found Cleese no less cogent in substance but a far funnier speaker. As a historical side note, I happened to be presenting at that same conference where Cleese’s speech contained in that video was recorded, was the first to shake his hand before that keynote speech and was in the audience when it was delivered. That video, available in the link above, contains some of the most memorable and important lessons I have ever heard. (Note to readers: Jim's original link to this video appears - unfortunately - to no longer be functional and since there appear to be no free workarounds, I am substituting the Cleese video below.)
The facts are irrefutable and beyond question. Mistakes are essential for learning, improvement, productivity and creativity.
The current limits on risk-taking imposed on compensation plans found in financial markets create a dangerously negative attitude towards attempts to be creative. You can’t do much new or innovative if you have to worry about being wrong before you even start experimenting. It can be hoped that proper and effective bureaucratic constraints on gambling with other people’s money do not create a cultural atmosphere where even minor mistakes are condemned. A more general resistance to making mistakes will cripple productivity and delay economic recovery. It also creates the danger that we will set precedents that fly in the face of historical findings in the field of behavioral modification. Intolerance of mistakes is a fundamental mistake of its own.
We in the HR and Compensation community have not been very helpful, because we typically only ask about what people do right. Tradecraft practices mandate a pretty universal focus on successful positive outcomes rather than on failures. Security guards are not paid more than office professionals, even though an error by the security staff could leave the warehouse robbed and the office trashed. On the contrary, we pay employees to do their jobs correctly rather than because of the potential hazards or damages that might follow if they do their jobs wrong. Broadly speaking, you don’t compensate people because of the potential cost of their errors. Even when “failure” is a useful outcome (a research scientist who identifies an unproductive blind trail, for example), the employee who comes up empty is appropriately rewarded for doing their job properly and saving the enterprise from investing further in a fruitless venture. The reward is not for failure to discover a new drug, for example, but for success in determining that this particular drug is worthless or even dangerous. No mistake has been made in that situation.
Mistakes supply feedback for corrective action, contingent options or improvements. If you make no mistakes, you rarely learn much.
Every time I’ve asked people to think of the most painful mistake ever made in their whole life and consider if they would wish the memory to be wiped out, they hesitate. When confronted with the choice of keeping their most painful memory or literally forgetting about it, having it removed from their minds so they will remember nothing about it, they always eventually answer, “no.” Their answer usually surprises them; but when you think about it, you realize that painful feedback is important feedback. You learned from it. The person you are today is a product of all those memories and experiences, good and bad, happy and sad, joyful and painful. Lose the memory of your painful mistake and you lose part of your identity, because that lesson made you who you are today.
No one is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes. Let’s learn from them rather than let them rule and ruin our lives.
E. James (Jim) Brennan is an independent consultant with extensive total rewards experience, specializing in job evaluation, market pricing and pay budget distribution. After HR corporate jobs in chemical/pharmaceutical manufacturing, he consulted at retail, government, energy, IT, tax-exempt and other industries throughout North America before becoming Senior Associate of pay survey software publisher ERI until 2015. A prolific writer (author of the Performance Management Workbook) and speaker, he gave expert witness testimony in many reasonable executive compensation cases both for and against the Internal Revenue Service. Jim also serves on the Advisory Board of the Compensation and Benefits Review.
Seems that Video Arts, the training film company Cleese founded and sold many years ago, now sells that speech film as a separate product. The hefty price tag for the ~half-hour video demonstrates how popular and valuable the lesson was. Wish I could charge $2,000 an hour.
Posted by: E. James (Jim) Brennan | 11/06/2015 at 12:44 PM