mistakes – Sasha Dichter's Blog

We all make mistakes.

Hopefully, today’s mistake happened because we aimed high and fell short: we thought we could deliver something amazing and it was only OK. We thought something was an appropriate risk to take but the dice turned up snake eyes. We thought we could keep all the plates spinning but we let one of them drop.

Regardless of why it happened, here we are.

The question now is: who is going to own that message? And how quickly?

It is incredibly tempting to choose to duck and cover in this moment.

Maybe our client, or our boss, won’t fully notice.

Maybe, even though we know that they will notice, we don’t feel ready to stand in the cold, harsh light of (our own and their) disappointment.

Worse, maybe we find ourselves minimizing and deflecting because our ego can’t stand the idea that we truly messed this one up.

This approach—which can feel safer—exposes us to a much greater risk.

Because the underpinning of all our relationships is trust. This trust can only exist if you and I are confident that we have the same understanding of what “good” and “great” look like.

When we hide from our mistake, when we miss the opportunity to say, first and loudly, “This wasn’t good enough,” we’re eroding that shared sense of confidence.

We’re opening the door to our customer asking themselves, “Do they [service provider] share my [purchaser] understanding of what we are trying to achieve here? Do we agree what “great” looks like?”

Once that question is asked, the conversation stops being about what went wrong and how to make sure that never happens again. In parallel, beneath the surface, unspoken questions fester: about values and judgment and standards, and whether they are shared between the two parties.

Because this conversation is hidden away, we won’t hear these questions until it is too late.

This is why we must own our mistakes clearly and forcefully—to ensure that this one-time mistake doesn’t metastasize into something much more harmful.

“This was our mistake.”

“This wasn’t us at our best.”

“I understand the negative impact this has had on you. Our job is to keep our promise to you, and we didn’t do it this time. We are committed to doing better next time.”

“This should never have happened, and it won’t happen again.”

We all know we’re supposed to be OK with mistakes, that they happen.

And yet, if you’re like me, you hate mistakes. You hate making them. And, sometimes, you can’t help being frustrated when those around you make them as well.

Which, of course, is both right and wrong.

Some mistakes really are a problem.

Careless mistakes—a term I mean literally, a lack of care taken for something important—really must be avoided. The discipline of a professional requires us to do our work with care and attention. This is the promise we make to ourselves, to our colleagues, and to our customers, and it’s our job to honor it each and every day.

Repeated mistakes are also a problem. They mean we’re not learning.

But no mistakes…that’s not OK.

It’s our job is to move at a certain pace, with a certain sense of forward motion, and with a willingness to walk out on limbs we’ve never stepped out on before. If we are doing all these things, we will have to get some things wrong some of the time–either because we moved too fast, or because we are trying things that are truly new to us, things that we’re not yet good at specifically because they are new.

If this seems counterintuitive, think of it this way: if we are getting nothing wrong all the time, that has to mean that we’re either absurdly lucky or that we’re not moving fast enough, not moving forward quickly enough, and we’re not walking out on limbs in the way we’d like to think we are.

Viewed in this light, mistakes aren’t just “not a problem,” they are valuable. They are the data that tell us: look at that, we are moving fast enough, we are being brave, we are taking enough risk.

We might still reflectively dislike mistakes in the moment, but it’s our job to praise the right kind of mistakes, and to praise the mistake-maker (whether ourselves or someone else) for their courage and bravery.

They (or we) are moving in the right way, taking the right risks, walking out on enough limbs, and, naturally, sometimes mis-stepping.

That’s good news indeed.