Mistakes Are Bad!

(This article is written about business but could be equally true inside yourself as an individual.)Recently I was working with a client on their business, and through the Inquiry Method™ we discovered an important cultural belief in their organization. We discovered that there was strong culture of “mistakes are bad!”As we looked deeper we found a bunch of other ideas about mistakes:

• They make clients lose confidence.
• They lose money, my money.
• They are made by people who don’t care.
• They are made by people who don’t have the clients’ best interest at heart.
• They are made by people who don’t care about their work.

Looking at those ideas, from one perspective we might say they could be true.On the other hand, these judgments about mistakes are not necessarily true. We make them true by believing in them and by creating a culture that says mistakes are bad.We discovered that this set of beliefs about mistakes drove the mistakes underground and created tension in the boss and the employees.Through Inquiry, once again, we looked at a potentially different culture around mistakes and came up with this:

• Mistakes do happen
• Mistakes can be an opportunity to be a hero to the client
• We can do our best to fix them
• We can do our best to avoid them
• When they happen, we look into them and see if we can fix the cause
• Sometimes they are just mistakes
• Even the boss makes mistakes

When we came up with this set of beliefs about mistakes, we could see that it would create a different culture around mistakes.When my client presented it to the team, there was a unanimous feeling of relief and excitement. The team decided to print up the list and put it on the wall. They decided that every time there was a mistake they were going to refer to the second list rather than the first.How would changing the culture of mistakes in your office change things?How would changing your persona/internal cultural beliefs about mistakes change you?