A Way To Be Realistic About Goofs, Gaffes and Foul-ups

We’re always thinking about how to bring our best new ideas to our clients. But there’s a catch:  Our best ideas and intentions inevitably lead to complications in the execution — glitches in seeing them through smoothly to reach the great results you dreamed would be there.

And it’s not always the big things. The problems I’m talking about aren’t often even mentioned in updates and project status reports to senior leadership. No, it’s the little goofs, gaffes and foul-ups in the way people interact deep inside the project that individually may seem like distractions and inconveniences, but which together have caused things to get bogged down, delaying the project or at least draining us of the satisfaction and the joy we hoped we’d find in getting the thing done. Worst of all, you may feel you’re no longer able to bring your best self to the project, much less have the time or energy to move your new ideas into play.

The common wisdom is that in order to come up with new ideas, a healthy organization has to encourage risk-taking and making mistakes by its employees. While it’s certainly true that senior management wants new ideas, it’s pretty obvious that the goofs that inevitably accompany the execution of those ideas are not as warmly welcomed — or even tolerated. But everyone makes them. So, the tendency may be to hope they blow over, avoid thinking about them,  blame big organizational shortcomings. This can lead to bad results and damaged relationships.

Contrary to a lot of what’s said and written on the subject, I don’t think it’s reasonable or realistic to expect management to start encouraging people to “fail fast” or waiting for “the culture” to start “embracing” the making of mistakes.

A more workable approach, and one that anyone can implement immediately, is to assume and foster an environment that recognizes mistakes, but pushes the post-mortem examination through the making of the mistake and encourages the actors to deal with the consequences openly and forthrightly — assessing and managing the damage and then demonstrating quickly that there’s been learning that can be used to  advance the idea.

If someone’s goofed and the evaluation stops there, that’s just a pure cost to the organization. But, if the person and the organization deal with it correctly, that can truly be viewed as an investment in innovation and progress.

Here are some tips for constructively dealing with mistakes:

1. ‘Fess up — quickly. Adopt the right attitude, which is that it’s regrettable but not a crime, that some good can come from it and that you mean to make it right.
2. Manage the damage. Assess what’s really been harmed by this goof. Remember, you’re not creating a Recovery Fund meant to address the collective fall-out from all the foul-ups of the year.
3. Find the root cause. What led up to it — failing to anticipate, incomplete handoff, inadequate time estimate?
4. Identify the learnings. What can we do to avoid things like this happening in the future?
5. Communicate in all directions about it.  Force a choice of focus: “personal failure” or “organizational benefit.” Is your objective to ridicule and/or punish or to fix this problem for the benefit of the customer and the organization?

It may be that the encouragement of “making mistakes” is too much to ask of most corporate cultures. But building habits of constructively recovering from mistakes will encourage management to make a clear distinction between so-called “poor decision-making” or “faulty execution” and the natural consequences of healthy risk-taking and the practice of taking corrective actions by a learning organization.