2010 - The Year of Errors

My New Year's Resolution:

Make more mistakes than anyone else in my field

Yep, my single biggest goal this year is to make a lot of mistakes.  Some may say I'm way ahead of the crowd on this and I take that as a compliment.  I've always been an experimenter - whether in the real world or simply in conversation - playing the "what if game" or the devil's advocate. 

Who knew that this process would allow me to become an expert in my field?

Jonah Lehrer did.  He wrote the book "How We Decide" published early this last year (2009.)  

The one thing I took away from this book was how the brain uses mistakes as guideposts for making better decisions in the future.  Without mistakes the brain has no way of knowing what the boundaries are for making future decisions.  In other words, if you've always been right, how can you make a good decision in a unique and different scenario?  You can't.  Mistakes allow you to have an inventory of options to bounce around to help you narrow down choices and make better decisions in unfamiliar and unconventional situations.  Something we're seeing more and more of in the business world today.

From a business perspective - and a motivation and influence perspective - this is important.  We often want our employees to be perfect.  Unfortunately, without a few mistakes behind them, they probably won't be as good as those that made a few errors.  In my post the other day about a culture of failure I proposed companies (and managers) encourage risk-taking and mistake-making.  It would seem this book supports that point of view.

But...

I'm glad I got a kindle for Christmas because the book was only $9.99 versus what you'd pay for the atom-based version.  It's worth the $9.99 - but not much more.  The book is along the same lines as "Blink" by Malcom Gladwell.  Many of the examples and stories are similar to those found in Mr. Gladwell's book.  

That said - it's not a disappointment, but it's not a "holy cow" book either.  I found some very interesting thought starters in here and I would - if you can get a cheap one - recommend it for a weekend read.

Rather than go into a lengthy review I put a few of the "money quotes" from the book in the slide presentation embedded below (email subscribers may have to click through to see the slides.)

Money Quotes - How We Decide

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Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=632019852]

I'm not going to buy the book and I will make more mistakes. Win/win for me!

[Paul Hebert]

Happy New Year Laurie!

[Scott Crandall]

Paul --- I loved your quotes from the book. I think this whole idea of "Making More Errors" makes a lot of sense. However, we need to think about how to harness (rather than suppress) that reality.

The Key, IMHO, is to get organizations to focus more strongly on WHY?, on mistake recovery, and on lessons learned, as opposed to WHO? and HOW? around the mistake itself. So much goes back to people understanding WHY we (the organization) exist, WHY we do what we do, and WHY that's important, that it sort of subsumes the whole mistake issue into it. If people understand AND buy-in, so much of the rest takes care of itself.

The Question becomes: How can we get more emphasis by managers on WHY rather than HOW? I think that's the 2010 Challenge.

BTW: I've really enjoyed your posts, and the ensuing conversations and controversies.

[Paul Hebert]

Thanks Scott. The quote I remember about Japanese culture from the film Rising Sun: Don't fix blame, fix the problem - very applicable here. It is a culture issue - one that can only be driven from the top.