Success Through Mistakes

/who-we-are/the-peopleJulian Hirst argues that only through mistakes can we ever take giant leaps.

In our business, mistakes are a wonderful thing. There are times, of course, when it is important not to make any mistakes—ask any surgeon or airline pilot. However, we at CentreStage actually encourage people to make mistakes. “There are no mistakes, save one: the failure to learn from a mistake” – that’s our motto! Who was it who said that? I think it was me!

With the possible exception of assessment centres, we love it when our customers get things wrong because in any personal development situation, making mistakes is the key to making progress. Now, I’m not just talking about the familiar wisdom of nothing ventured, nothing gained. While that maxim encourages a healthy attitude towards risk, it doesn't point to the positive benefits of not just risking mistakes, but actually of making them. The beauty of what we do is that those mistakes are made in a safe environment. My claim is that, as trainers, we should all cultivate the habit of encouraging people to make mistakes.

We can give delegates as much theory and information about “Johari Windows”, “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” and Edgar J.Chickenshit III’s Theorem of Underwater Soot Juggling” as we like. What is just as important is to give people the opportunity to try it out for themselves and get it wrong. Mistakes are not just golden opportunities for learning; they are, in an important sense, the only opportunity of learning something truly new.

Just recall how you learned to ride a bike. What is the first step in learning to ride? Falling off. You lean too far to the right and what happens? You fall. Next, you lean too far to the left and you fall again. Fall off and get back up enough times and you will learn to balance and ride the bike. So, a mistake is the first step in learning. Success comes from mistakes.

Of course when we learn to ride a bike we are starting from a position of no knowledge at all. When it comes to interpersonal skills we have a bit of a head start. Faced with trying out a new technique for dealing with others on say, a managing performance or coaching skills course, we can make an educated guess at a good starting point and take it from there. This general technique of making a more-or-less educated guess, working out its implications, and using the result to make a correction for the next phase has found many applications.

“As trainers, we should all cultivate the habit of encouraging people to make mistakes”

Those of you with luxury yachts doubtless use Sat Nav to find your way about. However, real Navigators determine their position at sea by first making a guess about where they are. They make a guess about exactly — to the nearest mile — what their latitude and longitude are, and then work out how high in the sky the sun would appear to be if that were (by an incredible coincidence) their actual position. Then they measure the actual elevation angle of the sun, and compare the two values. With a little more trivial calculation, this tells them how big a correction, and in what direction, to make to their initial guess. It is useful to make a good guess the first time, but it doesn't matter that it is bound to be mistaken; the important thing is to make the mistake, in glorious detail, so you have something serious to correct.

Using roleplay on learning events involves making mistakes in a group. You show them off, so that everybody can learn from them — not just yourself. This way, you get the benefit of everybody else's experience, and not just your own idiosyncratic path through the space of mistakes. This, by the way, is what makes us so much smarter than every other species. It is not so much that our brains are bigger or more powerful, but that we share the benefits that our individual brains have won by their individual histories of trial and error.

The key to this is knowing that in a roleplay situation mistakes are made so that nobody gets hurt and everybody can learn from the experience. Yes, some people feel uncomfortable with roleplay at first but what soon becomes apparent is that the earth does not swallow people up when they say, "Oops, you're right. I guess I made a mistake". You will find that people love pointing out your mistakes. If they are generous-spirited, they will appreciate you more for giving them the opportunity to help, and acknowledging it when they succeed, and if they are mean-spirited they will enjoy showing you up. Either way, everybody wins.

And that’s all to do with being receptive to honest feedback. On July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon. He said the historic words, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind". Did you know that once the Apollo Spacecraft lifted off, if it had continued on its initial trajectory it would have missed the moon by millions of miles? But because the onboard computers kept checking back with mission control and making adjustments based on the information, the craft hit its target and changed history.

Mistakes? Bring ‘em on!