Author Ian McEwan - "There are ways of being wrong that help others to be right"

From "This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress" by John Brockman, a collection of answers from famous scientists and thinkers to the question: "What scientific idea is ready for retirement?" This response is from British writer Ian McEwan:

Beware of arrogance! Retire nothing! A great and rich scientific tradition should hang onto everything it has. Truth is not the only measure. There are ways of being wrong that help others to be right. Some are wrong, but brilliantly so. Some are wrong but contribute to method. Some are wrong but help found a discipline. Aristotle ranged over the whole of human knowledge and was wrong about much. But his invention of zoology alone was priceless. Would you cast him aside? You never know when you might need an old idea. It could rise again one day to enhance a perspective the present cannot imagine.

[Hat Tip Brain Pickings]

Singer Idina Menzel knows how to live with mistakes

Tony-award winning actress Idina Menzel performed her megahit "Let It Go" as part of the New York Times Square celebration on New Year's Eve. And she was not perfect, resulting in the expected tide of Twitter snark (a brief taste can be found here). But even if her performance wasn't flawless, Menzel's response was perfect:

There are about 
3 million notes in a two-and-a-half-hour musical; being a perfectionist, it took me a long time 
to realize that if I'm hitting 75 percent of them, 
I'm succeeding. Performing isn't only about
 the acrobatics and the high notes: It's staying in the moment, connecting with the audience 
in an authentic way, and making yourself 
real to them through the music. I am more than the notes I hit, and that's how I try to approach my life. You can't get it all right all the time, but 
you can try your best. If you've done that, all 
that's left is to accept your shortcomings and have 
the courage to try to overcome them.

As Brene Brown states, you invite criticism simply by "stepping into the arena." Social media amplifies (and dumbs down) criticism - snark is so easy. To accept criticism with grace (even if it doesn't deserve it), forgive yourself, and work on improving is the mark of a true professional. And as Garr Reynolds points out in his discussion of this situation in Presentation Zen, Menzel asserts rightly that authenticity and connection trump perfection.

By committing her high-profile mistake, and most importantly by her handling of it, Idina Menzel has taught something important and useful to all of us.

How Laura Hillenbrand's disability shapes her distinctive narrative voice

One theme you might have noticed on this site - mistakes can lead to new discoveries, and limitations often confer advantages as much as disadvantages. An example of the latter from the New York Times Magazine profile of writer Laura Hillenbrand ("Seabiscuit)" and "Unbroken") by Wyl S. Hilton. Hillenbrand has long suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome and rarely leaves her home.

She has been forced by the illness to develop convoluted workarounds for some of the most basic research tasks, yet her workarounds, in all their strange complexity, deliver many of her greatest advantages. When I asked, for example, how she reads old newspapers on microfilm without traveling to a library, I was stunned to discover that she doesn’t. “I can’t look at microfiche,” she said. “I couldn’t do that even in my good vertigo years.”

Instead, Hillenbrand buys vintage newspapers on eBay and reads them in her living room, as if browsing the morning paper. The first time she tried this, she bought a copy of The New York Times from the week of Aug. 16, 1936. That was the day Seabiscuit’s team — his owner, Charles Howard; his trainer, Tom Smith; and his jockey, Red Pollard — first collaborated at the Detroit Fair Grounds. Hillenbrand told me that when the newspaper arrived, she found herself engrossed in the trivia of the period — the classified ads, the gossip page, the size and tone of headlines. Because she was not hunched over a microfilm viewer in the shimmering fluorescent basement of a research library, she was free to let her eye linger on obscure details.

“There was so much to find,” she said of her reading. “The number-one book was ‘Gone With the Wind,’ the Hindenburg flew over Manhattan with a swastika on it and Roosevelt made a speech saying America would never become involved in foreign wars.” Soon she bought another newspaper, and then another. “I wanted to start to feel like I was living in the ’30s,” she said. That elemental sense of daily life seeps into the book in ways too subtle and myriad to count.

Four Seasons Hotels review a daily "glitch report"

This is from the autobiography of Four Seasons founder Isadore Sharp, "Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy." Four Seasons has an unparalleled reputation for customer service.

Next up [in our daily review] is a review of the previous day's mistakes in something we call the Glitch Report. Every department in the hotel is represented at the morning meeting, and each has a printout detailing what has gone wrong and what steps may already have been taken to correct course. The Glitch Report ensures that every hotel department knows what happened and which guest it affected.

We might have missed a guest with something as simple as turndown service, and everybody listens to the department head responsible as he or she articulates what went wrong. That person will go to the root cause of the problem and tell everyone what will be done to fix it in that guest's eyes. Whatever the issue, making it right starts with a sincere apology. It can also mean trying to do something else for them later on in their visit. It can mean an amenity such as flowers or fresh fruit skewers or a bottle of wine. It could mean an appropriate adjustment or consideration on their bill. For each guest, we strive to find the right approach in the apology.

Sharp added this in an interview with Christopher Elliott: "What’s important with a glitch is not the error – it’s the recovery. Guests remember how they were treated and the outcomes, and we always strive to ensure that the outcomes are positive."

Great teams "see what they can improve," even after winning

A little nugget from Andrew Garda's article in Sports on Earth on the New England Patriots - Denver Broncos matchup on Sunday night. The Patriots, led by quarterback Tom Brady, beat Denver 43-21.

"It's back to work tomorrow to see what we can improve," Brady said after the game as his team headed into a bye week. "We can always improve."

It was a sentiment shared by left tackle Nate Solder.

"We have to continue to improve because we didn't do everything the way we wanted to," he said post-victory.

Never being satisfied is the mark of a good team. It's one thing to be unhappy when you lose, as Manning was. It's entirely different when you win, and win handily. It's a special sort of madness which makes great players great and carries teams to championships.

What's true in football is also true in sales, and in management. If you won a deal, or beat your numbers for the year, you didn't do everything "the way you wanted to." There's room for improvement, and the best leaders and teams will think this way.

Quote: Eleanor Roosevelt on not regretting mistakes

“I have never regretted even my mistakes. They all added to my understanding of other human beings, and I came out in the end a more tolerant, understanding, and charitable person.” - The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Scientist Freeman Dyson: trial and error created the bicycle

In a 1998 interview in Wired Magazine, Stewart Brand asked the famed physicist his thoughts on failure:

You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works - it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential. The same is true of airplanes.

(Hat tip to Jeff Stibel on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network)

"My Bad!" Skillful research proves you need to own your mistakes to learn from them

There are a number of reasons I've written less on the blog this year. One is that, after more than 5 years of thinking about mistakes and writing the book, I was running out of interesting things to say and observe (it's not an accident that most of the posts this year are stories and not items discussing mistakes and failure).

But another important reason is what has been called the "fetishization of failure." It has just become too trendy and easy to write about how we should all learn from failure, "fail fast and often," etc. etc. Too easy to start conferences on the topic, Twitter feeds, etc.

I believe that most or all of the people who have jumped on the failure bandwagon recently are well-intentioned and wish to raise people's awareness of the values of failure. But the inevitable result has been a watering-down and trivialization of something I consider really important.

And then. And then, scholars with serious credentials in this area like Francesca Gino, Bradley Staats and Christopher Myers publish a paper entitled, "'My Bad!' How Internal Attribution and Ambiguity of Responsibility Affect Learning from Failure" - a deeply-researched, well-written, clearly presented argument on how individuals' ability to learn from failure is directly affected by how they view their responsibility for it.

This isn't a new idea (the book has a section on "owning your mistakes") but rarely have I seen as impressive a discussion of the topic - and new research to boot. Gino et. al. start off with as clear a summary as you can get of previous scholarship on learning from failure. For example:

Learning from failed experiences has been of particular interest as organizations seek to adapt and avoid repeating prior failures (Ingram & Baum, 1997, Kim & Miner, 2007, Madsen & Desai, 2010). Relative to successful experiences, failures have been seen as more effective triggers of individuals’ learning efforts, because they reveal a gap in ability that stimulates efforts to “tweak” existing practices, search for new capabilities, and develop innovative solutions (Sitkin, 1992, March & Simon, 1993, Baum & Dahlin, 2007, Hora & Klassen, 2013). Following traditional theories of individual learning (e.g., Kolb, 1984), failure can be seen as a form of unexpected event (i.e., where actual outcomes differ from expected outcomes; Allwood, 1984) that creates a sense of discomfort that triggers individuals to make sense of it, test hypotheses, and stimulate growth (Louis & Sutton, 1991, Ellis, Mendel, & Nir, 2006). At the same time, by revealing that an existing strategy is unsuccessful, failures encourage broader search for new strategies (i.e., exploration), resulting in enhanced long-term innovation (March, 1991, Audia & Goncalo, 2007). Indeed, after a successful experience, it is more difficult to detect deviations from a plan (Ellis, Mendel, & Nir, 2006), as the successful outcome confirms the validity of a prior routine (Weick, 1984, Sitkin, 1992) and builds confidence (and complacency) regarding its utility for future performance (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 1999).

Note, first of all, the wealth of citations in the preceding paragraph. Learning from failure, or "unexpected events," which is closer to the definition I use in the book, is not a fad. It is a well-researched, grounded, fact. It is also easy to avoid - "ambiguity of responsibility" gives credence to individuals who wish to distance themselves from failure.

The new research presented is also profound. The authors test four hypotheses, two of which are central to everyone's ideas of learning from failure:

Hypothesis 2: The learning effects of failure are driven by internal attribution of the failed experience. Specifically, internal attribution moderates the effect of failure on learning, such that the effect of failure on learning is more positive when the failure is attributed more internally.

Hypothesis 3: Ambiguity of responsibility decreases internal attribution and learning from failure

The experiments carried out validated both these hypotheses - test subjects who took responsibility for a failure learned more, and situations where responsibility was unclear did not provide as strong a basis for learning from the failure. This is important stuff (and, as the authors suggest, an area where more study is needed).

Go ahead and follow the failure Twitter feeds and attend the conferences if you want, but, if you really want to understand how people learn from mistakes and how to improve the environment for such learning, read "My Bad!"

Cynthia Kurtz's "Working With Stories" is out now.... buy it!

Cynthia Kurtz is one of my favorite people and biggest inspirations. Her deep understanding of the wisdom of people's ordinary stories has informed almost everything I've worked on in the past five years, including this site, the book, and 3-Minute Journal.

So I am delighted to at least modestly repay her kindness by encouraging everyone to buy her newly-released magnum opus, "Working with Stories in Your Community Or Organization: Participatory Narrative Inquiry." I just bought my copy. It discusses everything (I mean everything) you need to know about story-gathering, sensemaking and acting on what you find. It's come a long way from the first 90-page PDF doc that I downloaded in 2008. (A dog-eared, heavily annotated copy of which is still in my "Narrative" file.)

Scientific American urges drug companies to release all clinical trial data

We've advocated over and over again for groups involved in experiments to release all data and results from those experiments - even those that don't succeed. "Dark data" can open up new areas of discovery and illuminate unforeseen issues with "safe" products.

Now, Scientific American magazine is taking up the cause. An article in its June issue, "Secret Clinical Trial Data To Go Public," discusses drug companies' reluctance to share any results that don't support their marketing efforts, and suggests how to open things up. The editors write:

How well does a prescription drug work? It can be hard for even doctors to know. Pharmaceutical companies frequently withhold the results of negative or inconclusive trials. Without a full accounting, a physician who wants to counsel a patient about whether a drug works better than a sugar pill is frequently at a loss. Drug companies share only airbrushed versions of data on safety and usefulness.

The editors go on to recommend drug trial information be published in an open data system akin to Yale's cleverly-named YODA project. Our hope is that big pharma jumps in whole-heartedly. Science and health-care patients present and future (that would be all of us) need it.

Selfless leaders share their own mistakes

From "The Best Leaders Are Humble Leaders," by Jeanine Prime and Elizabeth Salib on the HBR Blog Network, based on their research paper entitled "Inclusive Leadership: The View From Six Countries" for Catalyst Group:

To promote inclusion and reap its rewards, leaders should embrace a selfless leadership style. Here are some concrete ways to get started based on both our current research and our ongoing study of leadership development practices at one company, Rockwell Automation:

Share your mistakes as teachable moments. When leaders showcase their own personal growth, they legitimize the growth and learning of others; by admitting to their own imperfections, they make it okay for others to be fallible, too. We also tend to connect with people who share their imperfections and foibles—they appear more “human,” more like us. Particularly in diverse workgroups, displays of humility may help to remind group members of their common humanity and shared objectives....

People often feel that sharing mistakes is risky; the best way to overcome this perception is for leaders to go first, which sends two messages - everyone makes mistakes, and it's important to share them for the benefit of others.

Help star performers prepare for future setbacks

Today I read a very interesting piece by Sarah Green in the HBR Blog Network. Entitled "Star Performers Need Extra Affirmation After a Setback," it references a study by Jennifer Carson Marr of Georgia Institute of Technology and Stefan Thau of London Business School, which studied baseball players who lost their salary arbitration hearings. The study finds that the performance of star players suffered after the ruling, even though they had plenty of incentive (playing for next year's salary) to succeed. The analogy is that star performers in business can suffer the same pitfall after a career setback, such as a failed project.

The analogy makes sense - business stars don't fail very often, and tend to be showered with praise along the way. An objective failure, therefore, can feel devastating since it's so out of step with the norm.

Green recommends affirmation for star performers and their managers to help them deal with these situations. I'd also add some tough love - before the fact. As part of the career development process, managers should work with stars to expose them to low-risk failure situations - i.e., a small project that faces significant obstacles - to practice managing adversity and resourcefulness. An example would be applying to a conference to do a speech when the organizers are looking for more-senior executive speakers.

If the employee wins the assignment, it's a significant achievement. If she is rejected, the downside is very low, and the lessons of adversity and failure are experiences. When the bigger failure inevitably comes, she will be better prepared to handle it.

The Amazing Race is all about "mistakes and miscalculations"

This whole race is a comedy of errors... and [winning requires] accepting each others' errors and making up for them later.

Chip & Reichen, outside an airport in India, on The Amazing Race season 4, which they eventually won.

Grantland editor acknowledges serious mistakes with transgender story, apologizes

Last week, the sports site Grantland (an excellent site with great writing, by the way) posted a long piece by reporter Caleb Hannan on his search for Dr. V., the mysterious creator of a new-fangled golf putter. The reporter located the inventor and then, to his surprise, discovered that the inventor was a female who had been born male. This added many new layers to the story, including the author outing Dr. V. to one of her investors. Last October, Dr. V. committed suicide.

Reaction to the contents of the piece and the decision to publish it was swift and cutting. (Here's Maria Dahvana Headley, someone quoted in the Mistake Bank book, with a cogent analysis.) Grantland itself, after a few days, ran an essay from Christina Kahrl, an espn.com contributor who is also a director of GLAAD. (ESPN is the parent company of Grantland.) Finally, Bill Simmons, the site's creator and editor-in-chief, discussed Hannan's article and the decisions around publishing it. Simmons acknowledges significant mistakes and apologizes for running the article.

I was originally planning to discuss Simmons' apology in detail as a lesson on decisionmaking, reflection, and atonement. On further reflection, I've concluded that any lessons learned from this mistake, no matter how useful, are trivial compared the life of Dr. V. Our deepest condolences to her family and friends.

2014 - Story year

Hi, all,

We've been at this effort since 2007. There are more than 500 posts, roughly half stories and the rest on why embracing mistakes and failure is good for you and your business. This year, I am focusing on gathering more stories. There are lots of great stories out there from entrepreneurs and CEOs - but many fewer from customer service reps, programmers, nurses, managers, teachers, students, etc. In other words, ordinary folks. I would like to take this year and focus on gathering and sharing as many mistake stories as possible from this quieter group. I believe their stories have as much or more to teach us than any from Steve Jobs, Steve Martin or AG Lafley. But we won't know till we collect them.

So... if you have a story you'd like to share, anonymously or otherwise, or you know someone with a great story, please contact us at mistakebank (at) caddellinsightgroup (dot) com. I'm hoping to have at least one story a week to share. Join the effort to learn from mistakes!

This week... I'll share one of my stories.

Managing mistakes in business first means acknowledging they happen

Josh Patrick writes this in the New York Times blog You're the Boss:

Allowing mistakes requires that you trust your employees. You must trust that they are doing the best they can — that they aren’t trying to make mistakes. But here’s the thing: If you don’t allow mistakes, they will happen anyway. They’ll just get swept under the rug. When they are discovered, they have often become much larger problems. 

In larger companies, mistakes rarely put the company at risk. In smaller companies, they can be death blows. That’s why some owners overreact when a mistake happens, which was my inclination when I first started in business. Whenever a mistake was made, I would start screaming at whoever had made it — unless, of course, I had made it. In that case, I would pretend the mistake had never happened. It wasn’t until I learned to accept mistakes and start learning from them that our business started to grow.

 Mistakes will happen anyway. It seens obvious, but very few of us are able to recognize this and act accordingly. Recognizing they will happen anyway is the first premise of building a mistake-learning culture.

Looking for a New Year's Resolution? Start a journaling habit

Starting a new habit is as traditional part of a New Year's celebration as eating black-eyed peas. This year, consider starting a journal. It's a great way to mark accomplishments and things you're grateful for (or things you would rather avoid in the future). I have been keeping an online journal for the past two years and it's been very helpful for finding mistake patterns, as well as logging accomplishments - which is very helpful as you enter the annual review process.

Use paper, a word doc, or my favorite - the 3Minute Journal app (disclaimer: I have been involved in building the app). Plan to set aside a couple of minutes at the end of each weekday (or every day) to write down the most significant event that happened and answer a few questions about it. Within a month or so, you'll have a rich repository of data about yourself that you can use to track your inner work life.

Ask a friend to try it with you!

Breaking Bad creator describes rejections from networks

From Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, on the Rich Eisen podcast, discussing the fact that several networks passed on the show before AMC picked it up.

Then your studio and you have got to find a distributor or a broadcaster. You have to find your AMC. And that was a bit of a process. Getting to AMC involved several "no thank yous" along the way. Which is not atypical. Every movie, every TV show, every book you ever loved, probably all the ones you hated too, even were said "no" to by a half dozen people or more. But all it takes is the one "yes."

Negative results are decreasing in scholarly papers

One of the side effects of our fear of mistakes is the discrediting of negative findings. On the few occasions when I played craps in a casino, I noted how poorly the other players at the table reacted when I bet the "don't pass" line - essentially, betting on the dice roller to fail - when the outcome of a roll was perfectly random and the expected payout was no different whether you played pass or don't pass.

The craps example demonstrates how dysfunctional trying to deny the negative is. As Edison said, "[Negative results are] just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don't."

Given the above, reading the abstract of this 2012 paper was both unsurprising and somewhat discouraging. Entitled "Negative results are disappearing from most disciplines and countries," by Daniele Fanelli and published in the March 2012 issue of Scientometrics, the paper indicates a significant increase of scholarly papers reporting that their study results supported the stated hypothesis, rather than disproving it:

This study analysed over 4,600 papers published in all disciplines between 1990 and 2007, measuring the frequency of papers that, having declared to have “tested” a hypothesis, reported a positive support for it. The overall frequency of positive supports has grown by over 22% between 1990 and 2007....

Fanelli notes some fascinating cultural differences in reporting negative findings, and included these wise words of warning:

A system that disfavours negative results not only distorts the scientific literature directly, but might also discourage high-risk projects and pressure scientists to fabricate and falsify their data.

Yes indeed.

[Hat tip @Mangan150]

See some prior posts on negative data in research: "Free the Dark Data in Failed Scientific Experiments," "Web site offers scientists access to lessons from failed experiments."

Football quarterback relies on a "database" of failed decisions

From Sports Illustrated's Monday Morning Quarterback column. Nick Foles of the Philadelphia Eagles is having a great season, including a remarkable run with no interceptions - but he almost did throw one:

On Sunday, trying to get some insurance for a 24-21 lead with four minutes left, Foles had a 2nd-and-7 at his 34-yard line, and he faced a heavy rush. Instead of throwing it away, Foles floated one down the middle of the field into coverage. Cornerback Patrick Peterson picked it off—and there went the Foles streak. But a late flag came flying, and Tyrann Mathieu was called for holding wideout Jason Avant.

[Translation of above for people who don't follow American football - the quarterback dropped a few steps behind the line of scrimmage and looked to pass. As guys from the other team came close to tackling him for a loss of yardage, he threw the ball inadvisedly down the middle of the field, where there were lots of opposing defenders. One of them caught the ball for an interception. However, the referee called a penalty on another player for holding, and the play was negated and the interception didn't count.]

“Man, horrible throw, horrible decision,” Foles said from Philadelphia an hour after the game. “When I saw the flag and heard the call, I said, ‘Thank you God.’ I learned my lesson there. But that’s what I try to do: I build a database with decisions like that, and I learn from them. If I get that same look [defensive formation] the next time, I’ll make a different throw, or I’ll throw it away.”

Do you have a database for your decisions that don't work out, and what you'll do differently the next time you're faced with the same situation?