"Celebrate the mistakes that don't happen" - yes, in certain circumstances

We celebrate mistakes in this space, for all sorts of good reasons - to promote learning, empathy, and experimentation. But Heidi Grant Halvorson has a helpful reminder on Harvard Business Review Blog Network that not all mistakes are smart ones ("Celebrate the Mistakes that Don't Happen").

When an organization (or an individual) makes a big, expensive and embarrassing mistake, it attracts loads of attention. But do you know what almost never attracts the attention it deserves? When things go the way they are supposed to. And because of this, roughly half of us — people we call prevention-focused — rarely get the credit we are due.

As I've written about before, prevention-focused people see their goals in terms of what they might lose if they don't succeed. They want to stay safe — to hold on to what they've already got. As a result, they are diligent, accurate, analytical, and go out of their way to avoid mistakes that might derail their success. They excel when it comes to keeping things running smoothly.

Promotion-focused people, on the other hand, see their goals in terms of what they might gain if they succeed — how they might advance or obtain rewards. Their strengths, relative to the prevention-focused, are creativity, innovation, speed, and seizing opportunities — exactly the kinds of qualities that the business community (and our culture as a whole) tends to admire and praise.

But what the story of the Mars Climate Orbiter so compellingly illustrates is that there isn't (or at least wasn't) nearly enough prevention-thinking going on in the NASA labs. It's not really surprising — these people, after all, are rocket scientists. They devote their lives to exploring space — if there is something more promotion-focused than that, I don't know what it is. These folks pretty much own the phrase "going where no one has gone before."

Now, as we know, context is vitally important when determining when a behavior is helpful or harmful. In environments of instability, disruption, or uncertainty, a "prevention focus" can be dangerous - and can have the counterintuitive effect of increasing mistakes, by inhibiting sharing and reporting. But, in environments where precision, standardization and repeatability is paramount, prevention-focused employees are the key.