What do pacemakers, penicillin, and potato chips have in common?
They were all created through mistakes. Behind these products are involuntary inventors whose original ideas failed during implementation. Today, humanity looks back at these inventions to see that supposed failures were actually triumphs. Failures, mistakes, mishaps – they all play an important role and help with learning and growth. Too often, however, companies or teams punish mistakes. The result of such a negative error culture is over-cautious, timid, and nervous colleagues: not an environment in which new ideas can flourish. Innovative companies, on the other hand, promote a culture where attention is focused on rectifying the error rather than identifying the person responsible.
Innovation requires courage
An urban legend tells the story of a very special class assignment. In a German lesson, students are given the task of writing down what courage is. The assignment is scheduled for two hours, but one student hands it in after just two minutes. The teacher looks on in disbelief. On the student’s worksheet, written in large letters, it says: “This is courage!”. The teacher was impressed by the student’s cleverness and awarded an A with a gold star.
Courage is a central value of agile working. Since childhood, and particularly since school, most of us have been conditioned to believe that mistakes are something bad and will most likely be punished. For creativity to flow—meaning for solution-oriented thinking and action to take hold—it is important to remove the team’s fear of punishment. Regular feedback loops and open cooperation prevent courage from turning into recklessness or degenerating into overconfidence.
The assessment of whether a certain action was erroneous or exactly right is all too often in the eye of the beholder. Many errors and mistakes are simply not seen from one perspective, but are very much apparent from another context.
4 tips for a successful error culture
- Build trust and security. As an employee, I want to feel safe to try something new. The key is mutual trust.
- Learn from each other. As an employee, I want to see that everyone makes mistakes sometimes and that the team benefits from sharing these experiences.
- Request and provide feedback. The earlier and more specific the feedback is, the more effective the learning process and thus the improvement process will be.
- “Just go for it!” The goal is to promote a culture characterized by learning, creativity, and openness. Employees should be encouraged to implement and test their ideas and to learn from unavoidable mistakes.
4 tools for a successful error culture
- A Fail Wall is a board where team members describe situations in which they failed, what they learned, and sign it with their name.
- Celebration Grids are a visual way to represent the outcome of an experiment, regardless of whether that experiment was successful or not. It shows us where we can celebrate the good practices resulting from a positive outcome and where we have learned something from our mistakes. Celebration Grids make it clear when learning is taking place and are a tool that leads to a healthy error culture in four steps:
1. Plan experiments – small but regular
2. Deliberately factor in mistakes
3. Make your results visible
4. Evaluate your results based on the following questions:
– What did we do well?
– What did we learn?
– What do we want to vary next time? - Retrospectives are team meetings focused on learning from the past. To do this, team members look back together and evaluate what went well and what went poorly. They also analyze why things were good or bad in order to take improvement measures.
- Fuckup Nights are staged events where founders or project managers tell stories of failure. They have high entertainment value and promote mutual “learning from each other.”
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