Another Thought on Mistakes as Portals
Randy Nelson’s presentation Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age: A New Model for the Workplace provoked and helped coalesce a range of recent thoughts and ideas. In addition to ideas on collaboration described in a previous post, Nelson also commented on mistakes which immediately took me back to a post by Gardner Campbell almost a year ago, Mistakes as Portals. In relation to Pixar’s search for innovative potential employees, Nelson commented:
The core skill of innovators is error-recovery not failure avoidance.
Nelson explained that resiliency and adaptability are critical skills. I interpreted Nelson’s conversation to suggest – to me at least – that avoiding failure may just as likely indicate an overly cautious individual as it will an overly proficient one. It is far more important to try, fail and recover from failure than it is to avoid the failure altogether. When I first read Gardner’s post earlier this year, I focused – as my comment suggests – on the “how terrible it was that schooling had kept mistakes from being turned into opportunities while the learning was taking place.” However, revisiting Gardner’s post within the context of Nelson’s comments, a different statement stood out:
We must be willing to open our minds to each other as we learn, and endure our mistakes, and be alert to the possibilities of learning that mistakes can reveal or even inadvertently stimulate.
Apply this to a workgroup with an organization. We must open our minds to each other as we work and endure our mistakes . . . to be alert to the possibilities of discorvery that mistakes can reveal or stimulate. That is the skill and type of work environment Nelson highlights in regards to Pixar. The ability to fail and recover is critical. For that skill to be cultivated however, the organization must, as Gardner suggested, induce professionals to trust one another with their individual mistakes.