Business Insight Zone

Probably not well enough, is the upshot of this interesting New York Times article about mistakes, which references Carol Dweck’s breakthrough book Mindset as well as Paul Schoemaker’s Harvard Business Review article “The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes.” Some running commentary follows — your comments are most welcome.

The Many Errors in Thinking About Mistakes

. . . We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.

Carol S. Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has studied this and related issues for decades.

“Studies with children and adults show that a large percentage cannot tolerate mistakes or setbacks,” she said. In particular, those who believe that intelligence is fixed and cannot change tend to avoid taking chances that may lead to errors.

One of the problems in some varieties of corporate management is its tendency to prize academic achievement per se. Good students tend to be good at following directions and being right within the context of an established field of knowledge; they go to class, they study diligently, and then they apply their knowledge in tests, papers, laboratory experiments, and so on. But many students — even good ones — don’t internalize the reality that high-level practitioners of university subjects (chemists, historians, sociologists, etc.) work hard to pursue original work that doesn’t fit the neat categories of existing knowledge.

My own current experience working toward a Ph.D. in history confirms this: plenty of smart people breeze through the coursework and qualifying examinations of a doctoral program, only to grind to a halt on the dissertation, because that’s the first time that their feet are held to the fire to produce something new. The real scholars in the group take on this challenge with aplomb, typically because they’ve already been branching into new work at the earlier stages. The next-best students apply a good work ethic and wend their way toward something original. The permanent ABDs,* by contrast, fizzle out for many different reasons, but in many cases they do so because they never get comfortable with — or even don’t see themselves as capable of — producing original work. I’ve seen cases where this is merely an exaggerated case of the polished but shallow undergraduate who can repeat anything she’s read or heard, but who can’t think critically on her own.

As we get older, many of us invest a great deal in being right. When things go wrong, as they inevitably do, we focus on flagellating ourselves, blaming someone else or covering it up. Or we rationalize it by saying others make even more mistakes.What we do not want to do, most of the time, is learn from the experience.

The best organizations run into plenty of errors, but they have structures in place to make sure that they don’t (a) make the same errors over and over, or (b) make random, dissociated errors as they flail from one approach to the next. Inferior organizations and inferior managers tend to make not just one but both of these errors, in my experience.

If businesses and people are not making a certain number of mistakes, “they’re playing it too safe,” [Wharton teacher Paul Schoemaker] said. . . . [According to Schoemaker,] [w]e are risk-averse because “our personal and professional pride is tied up in being right. Employees are rewarded for good decisions and penalized for failures, so they spend a great deal of time and energy trying not to make mistakes.”

In too many organizations, too much merit is accorded to color-by-numbers achievements, and too many demerits accrue to constructive mistakes. Don’t you think?

“We get fixated on achievement,” [Rutgers management professor Stanley Gully] said, but, “everyone is talking about the need to innovate. If you already know the answer, it’s not learning. In most personal and business contexts, if you avoid the error, you avoid the learning process.”

This opens up another whole conversation about the literature of business innovation that has proliferated in the past few years. In many cases, the answer is, at bottom, as simple as “Try new things. See what works.” But we feel the need to build elaborate structures around these concepts that will let us appear to pursue innovation while actually continuing to avoid the “failure” of making mistakes.

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* Footnote, added midday 27 November: “ABD” = “all but dissertation,” i.e. all parts of the Ph.D. are complete except the last, biggest, most important part.