As I emphasize on my list to left of 15 Things That I Believe, one of the best diagnostic to assess whether an organization is effective or innovative is "What Happens When Someone Makes a Mistake?" I made that this argument one way or another in every book I have every written and perhaps 50% of the speeches I have made in the past decade. As I say in the above link (which is a story about Amazon, an organization that continually impresses me with its learning culture):
"Failure will never be eliminated, and so the
best we can hope for from human beings and organizations is that they
learn from their mistakes, that rather than making the same mistakes over and
over again, they make new and different mistakes.
The upshot for Jeff
Pfeffer and me is that, perhaps the single best diagnostic to see if an organization is
innovating, learning, and capable of turning knowledge into action is “What happens when they make a mistake?”
Stealing some ideas from research on
medical errors, leaders and teams can “forgive and forget,” which may be temporarily comforting,
but condemns people and systems to make the same mistakes over and over again –
in the case of hospitals, this means you bury the dead (or close the incision)
and don’t talk about it. Or you can remember
who made mistakes, chase them down, humiliate them, and thus create climate of
fear. In such situations, the game becomes avoiding the finger of blame rather
than surfacing, understanding, and fixing mistakes (see Harvard’s Amy
Edmondson’s wonderful research on drug treatment errors for evidence on
this point). Or you can Forgive
and Remember, which is not only the title of a great book by Charles Bosk,
it is the philosophy that the best teams and organizations use. You forgive
because it is impossible to run an organization without making mistakes, and
pointing fingers and holding grudges creates a climate of fear. You remember –
and talk about the mistakes openly –so people and the system can learn. And you
remember so that, even though you have tried to retrain people and teach them,
if some people keep making the same mistakes over and over again, then, well,
they need to be moved to another kind of job."
The connection to The No Asshole Rule, however, was made clear in a most thoughtful blog post from Peter Seebach in response to the book. I was especially taken by this paragraph about his workplace:
I don’t think we explicitly have a “no-asshole” rule; if we do, I’ve
not been told of it. We do, however, have a corporate culture which
undermines the things that are essential for bullying. There’s a total
lack of interest in blame, so far as I can tell. People certainly can,
and do, try to figure out how something went wrong — but not for the
purpose of assigning blame, just for the purpose of fixing it. No one
expects that people won’t make mistakes, or yells at them for making
mistakes. As a result, people are more comfortable than they might
otherwise be coming forward with information about problems which were
caused by their mistakes. Net result: Less time trying to shift blame,
less time before the problem is fixed.
Now that sounds like a functional workplace.. a nearly perfect example of how "forgive and remember" ought to work. And the link to rule is splendid.
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