"Failure is just evidence that you haven't mastered the task yet"

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson has an important article in the July 2008 HBR that says a lot of things about learning in the business world. The following excerpt has some particular relevancy to The Mistake Bank:

In her research on individual mind-set differences, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has shown that the way children view a task affects their persistence and performance over time. Some children think of human ability or intelligence as fixed and, consequently, think of school tasks as performance opportunities--moments of truth that prove whether they're smart [JC note: call it the Hermione Granger syndrome]. For these children, performing poorly on an assignment or a test would demonstrate that they lacked intelligence rather than indicating that they had more to learn. Believing that the point of execution is to demonstrate competence, they go out of their way to pick easier tasks. Of course, this means they lose out when it comes to learning. This same mind-set encourages managers to admire and expect to be rewarded for decisiveness, efficiency, and action rather than for reflection, inquiry, and collaboration, the uncertainty of which makes them uncomfortable. Like the children who have learned to shun new challenges, these managers avoid, and help others avoid, the risks of questions and experiments.

In psychologically safe environments, people are willing to offer up ideas, questions, concerns - they are even willing to fail - and when they do, they learn. In her studies, Dweck found that some children - those who early on were rewarded for effort and creativity more than for simply giving the right answer - see intelligence as something malleable that improves with attention and effort. Tasks are opportunities for learning; failure is just evidence that they haven't mastered the task yet. Driven by curiosity about what will and will not work, they experiment. When things don't pan out, the don't give up or see themselves as inadequate. They pay attention to what went wrong and try something different next time. In adults, such a mind-set allows managers to strike the right tone of openness, humility, curiosity, and humor in ways that encourage their teams to learn."

Dweck's research on "growth" vs. "fixed" mindsets has a lot to say about whether we can learn from our mistakes or be paralyzed by them.