Leaders fixated on outcomes treat the path as just friction, a hassle. In reality, the journey is where compounding growth lives: in the errors, corrections, and patterns you either notice or don’t. To help your team grow, stop focusing on avoiding a specific mistake. Aim to make those mistakes count.
What “Net-Positive” Actually Means
Every mistake has an immediate cost. That’s visible and unavoidable. Assuming a mistake has happened, that cost is sunk cost. To make it net-positive, the long-run yield on the mistake must exceed its short-run cost.
To achieve that, we have to focus on extracting ROI from the mistake we paid for. You’ve surely heard the saying “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The truth is that it doesn’t have to. You only get stronger if you make sure to learn from that mistake. Otherwise, it just hurts.
What Leaders Get Wrong
Leaders often treat mistake analysis as a backward-looking exercise, looking only to close the loop and move on. That framing leaves the most valuable part on the table: organizational learning and system improvement.
The goal isn’t to make fewer mistakes. It’s to make better ones. I often repeat to my clients that it’s perfectly fine to make mistakes; everyone makes them. As long as they keep making new mistakes, they’re at least not wasting their learning and time. So rather than try to avoid all mistakes (which is impossible, some will always happen), we should ensure we squeeze everything we get out of those mistakes that slip through.
The Four Questions I Ask Every Client
If you want to turn your mistakes into value-generating events, here are some questions you have to consider and answer truthfully.
Has this type of error already happened before? Why did it happen again? The foundation of moving faster as the team matures is not to commit the same mistakes. If you’ve been through this, you should understand what went wrong the last time. Otherwise, you’re doomed to turn this mistake into a pattern.
Did you fix this instance, or did you fix the system so it doesn’t recur? To maximize your learning and value from this mistake, don’t just aim to fix it specifically. That will only cover you from committing precisely the same error again. Your lessons learned should be broader and cover similar future instances.
And fixing the system is about making the problem impossible wherever possible. For example, sometimes I see teams producing checklists and decisions as outputs of their learning processes, which is fine. But fixing the system is genuinely achieved when we make the problem a non-issue. Can you automate the process rather than add a checklist?
Was anyone aware and stayed silent (or was ignored)? What does that say about the environment? Like that Sherlock Holmes bit, you want to ask yourself, why didn’t the dogs bark? Effective organizations need effective chutzpah. And if people did speak up but were dismissed, you have to ensure those who made that call reassess their thinking and also address that behavior so as not to discourage people from speaking up again in the future.
Did the learning stay with the people who made the mistake, or did the whole org get smarter? Yes, the specific person can fix their local setup so a mistake doesn’t happen again to them. But what about sharing it with the entire team’s setup? Even better, can it be spread across the engineering organization so that a mistake by a single person benefits everyone?
Keep having the mental image of squeezing a lemon dry, getting every single drop. We want to make lemonade here, and tons of it. And if you find yourself still repeating mistakes, consider injecting some external help.