We’re all human, and to err is human. I can guarantee that you and your team will be making heaps of mistakes. However, I cannot say how much you’ll learn from them. Are you letting all those learning opportunities go to waste?

A World of Difference

Between the teams that utilize their errors and those that just shrug them off and move on, there’s a clear and noticeable gap. Working with them, I can see straightaway which ones are those that extract all that there is to gain from a mistake, and which cannot wait to continue. The latter usually explain this rush to themselves as a “sense of urgency” or “moving fast.” When you change moving fast from a means to an end, the only thing you’re guaranteed to get is fatigue.

When we take the time to reflect and assess our performance, we maximize the ROI from every day. We greatly reduce the chance of committing the same mistakes, and thus make way for some new, better mistakes! Teams that neglect doing this are bound to repeat the same mistakes while muttering something about “the hustle.”

Let’s see some common areas of mistakes that get wasted. I’m sure you’re already doing some of these, yet I’ve rarely seen teams that take good care of all of these.

Your Learning Opportunities

Let’s start with the easy stuff. What do you do when there’s a major outage or bug? Most professional teams nowadays know that these should be followed by a post-mortem. Sadly, these are often just held for show. Remaining shallow and straightforward, they usually mention the last step in a chain of issues. Avoiding the deep dive to get to the bottom of things and finding root causes is an example of a wasted learning opportunity.

Similarly, we have day-to-day execution issues. The brilliant people who came up with agile development a few decades ago realized that we need to reflect on our performance. Many of us know that “retrospectives” are good, but we often stop holding these regularly. The reason? Because we do them so half heartedly that they produce even less impact than weak post-mortems. When no one speaks up in a retro, or when we talk about things but nothing ends up as an action item, we learn to hate these meetings. That’s instead of using them as fountains of learning.

Given that I’ve written about them in the past, I’ll just mention in passing the importance of impact retrospectives in this context.

Learning is not limited to technical aspects. What about hiring mistakes? Every leader will hire the wrong people from time to time. Again, we’re all human. The issue is about those who have made this mistake and then find the replacement following the exact same processes and evaluations, repeating the mistake. This is especially important if your team has made several of these mistakes over the course of the last 12 months.

And one last example is about growth assessments. I’m going to assume that you regularly coach your team members and set personal goals. Whenever these goals end up being too hard, not interesting, or not followed up on, we owe it to the team to reflect on that. That’s how we become better coaches. The worst thing you can do is scrap everything at the turn of the quarter and start with new ones.

Finally, don’t make the mistake of missing out on more opportunities to learn. Like checking out what I’ve got here below this paragraph.