Dr. Bhaskar Chatterjee, the chief guest at the CLO Summit India earlier this month, spoke that mistakes should be part of a learning organization’s culture. That resonated strongly with me. I have written about how we all learn more from mistakes. At Upside Learning do ask all our employees to not be afraid of making mistakes.
Dr. Chatterjee shared an example of an organization in Bangalore that dedicates a day each month to discuss their ‘best mistakes’. Senior executives share their biggest failures and what they learnt from it. I see tremendous merit in such an idea as it drives away the fear of failure from staff’s minds. Once liberated from that fear, good things can happen.
I am keen to try such a thing at Upside as well. I’m looking for support – case studies or maybe some ‘dos and don’ts’ on how to go about learning from “Best-Mistakes”.
I could find just this link to a July 2006 article in Business Week How Failure Breeds Success which has some examples mentioned– IBM, Intuit, GE, Coring, Virgin, & JetBlue.
Do you know of any other resources to share on this topic?
Please suggest by posting a comment to this post. Thanks
December 3rd, 2009 at 1:29 am
Hi Amit,
I would rather encourage your organization to learn from others’ mistake or failure. Ample resources, in terms of case studies and papers, can be found on internet.
-Sam
December 3rd, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Sam, Thanks for your your comments.
I absolutely agree with you – we should learn from others’ mistakes. It’s like preparing the team for not making mistakes or avoiding mistakes. And I think we try to do just that through all the structured training programs we do.
However, mistakes are inevitable and we are looking to have a structure/process that helps us learn from them. Another important aspect I am trying to address is to have a work environment which allows everyone to feel ok when they make mistakes. When senior people share their failures, everyone else would be ok to share theirs too.
Looks forward to your thoughts.
December 3rd, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Kia ora e Amit!
The mistake is to be celebrated.
Catchya later
December 4th, 2009 at 1:25 am
Amit,
Get the organization involved in continuous improvement processes by formally evaluating past performances, including mistakes, and identifying ways to make improvements. You can make this precess work for individuals in a team format so peer-to-peer knowledge sharing can also help the individuals.
-Sam
December 4th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Hi Ken,
Thanks for sharing the link. The video there is amazing!