In his riveting TEDx talk, former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink tells the story of a fire fight that broke out during his deployment in Iraq. What was particularly horrendous is that “through a series of mistakes and human error and poor judgment,” both parties were friendly forces -- committing fratricide, the mortal sin of combat: One soldier dead, several seriously wounded. When Willink was told by his commanding officer to prepare a debrief, he knew what that meant: "Somebody had to pay, to be held accountable. Somebody had to get fired for what had happened.”
A few years ago, Deloitte conducted a survey of professionals from 1,300 organizations and 120 countries to better understand stress at work. Of the 23,000 people surveyed, a significant percentage — 82% — said the top cause of stress at work was realizing that they had made a mistake, i.e. being in their equivalent of the difficult situation Willink was in.
Most of us are not making life-or-death decisions at work. Still, the stress associated with making mistakes makes sense when we take human biology into account. That’s because, early on in our human existence, if we made a mistake — e.g. telling the tribe, “Hey guys, I think there’s food over there!” and leading them into an enemy camp instead — we became a liability. This could mean exile from the tribe, a very real threat to physical survival before the days of Amazon Prime.
Today, even after thousands of years of evolution, the primitive part of our brain still reflexively triggers the “fight or flight” reaction and signals the alert “We’re going to die!” whether the consequences of a mistake are life-threatening or not.
The thing is, as the pace and complexity of work increases, mistakes are inevitable and necessary. If we don’t learn to master our biology, our stress levels will only rise. Our focus should be on minimizing mistakes that are avoidable and transforming our attitude about those that aren’t.
Here’s my playbook for how to do that:
Avoid "unforced errors.” All mistakes are not created equal. In tennis, an unforced error is one where the player wasn't under particular time pressure or out of position to make the shot. Likewise, you shouldn’t be making mistakes due to lack of preparation or attention: There are too many moving parts in our lives and work to rely on memory or winging it. For standard deliverables and processes — updates to technical specs, formatting presentations, new client invoices — checklists, templates and automation are your friend.
Develop "mistake amnesia.” On the other hand, if you’re doing something new or hard, you’re making decisions with imperfect information, in an environment of uncertainty. Some of those decisions are going to look like mistakes because they didn’t produce the result you wanted. Don't judge or second-guess a past decision with the knowledge and experience you have now.
This isn't easy. We’re conditioned to beat ourselves up — clients often tell me they can’t forget a “bad" decision they made years ago. But as Ben Horowitz, entrepreneur-turned-VC and author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things says, “You can't worry about the mistakes, because you're going to make a lot of them. You've got to be thinking about your next move.”
Extract the learning. Research shows that when we make a mistake, the brain goes in one of two directions: Either it sees the mistake as a threat and chooses to avoid the discomfort of thinking about it. Or, it treats the negative outcome like a problem that needs solving: What happened and why? It increases its attention during the next decision, as if trying to prevent a repeat.
You can guess which approach is likely to enhance your performance. Mind you, making a mistake is never going to feel good. But, ideally, you “forget” the emotional discomfort and shift your focus to solving the “problem." The best leaders systematize this process in three ways.
They use mistakes to refine their decision-making. Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, a $150 billion hedge fund, calls himself a “professional mistake maker” and says "every time I made a mistake, I would write it down...thinking about what are the criteria for making the decision. When the next one came along we had an agreed upon way of dealing with it.”
They make it safe. Cofounder and CEO of Kinnek, a small business marketplace, Karthik Sridharan realized that if he didn’t create a safe environment for making mistakes, people would start optimizing for short-term goals and the company would miss out on valuable learning that could sustain its long-term growth. So he introduced a weekly "all hands" meeting where each team shares lessons learned. The underlying message: making mistakes is part of your job.
They view mistakes as intellectual property. In his interview with Tim Romero on the Disrupting Japan podcast, Peatix founder Taku Harada said, “I tell the team it’s good that we made the mistake today and we’ve learned from it, because our competitors are going to run into it a year later [when it will cost much more].” Most people think of IP as technical features and patents. But there's real value in the mistakes you’ve made when you extract the learning which can be considered valuable IP.
Accept full responsibility. Mistakes, in and of themselves, are simply events with no inherent negative meaning — it’s up to us to determine the meaning. Ultimately, what's more important is our response.
When your mistake affects others, advises career coach Caroline Ceniza-Levine, acknowledge it promptly and apologize to the people who were inconvenienced. "If your faulty sales projections meant that your group presentation fell flat, apologize to each member of your team after the meeting: I dropped the ball on the sales analysis. I’ll redo it and hand it in separately. I’m sorry for the mistake.”
This will be uncomfortable. Willink took what he calls extreme ownership for the military mission that went wrong, even though there were members of his team who were willing to admit fault, even though it was painful. “It hurt my ego,” he says. "It hurt my pride to take the blame. But I also knew that to maintain my integrity as a leader and as a man I had to take responsibility. I had to control my ego so my ego did not control me."
His commanding officer had expected excuses. When Willink refused to take the easy way out, he defied his survival instincts and earned the trust of his superiors.
As humans, we’ve evolved to a place where mistakes are an opportunity for growth, learning and bonding — what if we used them that way?
