The Many Errors in Thinking About Mistakes

New York Times

...Mr. Schoemaker would agree. He was the co-author of a June 2006 article for the Harvard Business Review called “The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes.” Among its theories is that there is too much focus on outcome rather than on process.

If businesses and people are not making a certain number of mistakes, “they’re playing it too safe,” he said.

The resistance to making mistakes runs deep, he writes, but it is necessary for the following reasons, which he outlined in the article:

• We are overconfident. “Inexperienced managers make many mistakes and learn from them. Experienced managers may become so good at the game they’re used to playing that they no longer see ways to improve significantly. They may need to make deliberate mistakes to test the limits of their knowledge.”
• We are risk-averse because “our personal and professional pride is tied up in being right. Employees are rewarded for good decisions and penalized for failures, so they spend a great deal of time and energy trying not to make mistakes.”
• We tend to favor data that confirms our beliefs.
• We assume feedback is reliable, although in reality it is often lacking or misleading. We don’t often look outside tested channels.

Of course, there are mistakes and then there are mistakes.

“With children, you want them to make mistakes, but not end up in prison or in a wheelchair,” Mr. Schoemaker said. One also has to weigh the consequences. We want people who run nuclear power plants or fly planes to avoid mistakes as much as possible.

But most of us are not holding people’s lives in our hands and can stand to take a few more chances.

“Unfortunately, the people who most need to make mistakes are the ones least likely to admit it, and the same is true of companies,” Mr. Schoemaker wrote...