Why Admitting Mistakes Drives Success

Culture matters. It matters immensely. Here’s why.

Great companies are not the companies that do everything well. Those companies don’t exist.

Great companies are the ones that are constantly identifying problems and solving them.

In the early 1990’s, a young researcher named Amy Edmondson – now a Harvard Professor – was studying the performance of medical teams at Massachusetts hospitals. Her hypothesis was unremarkable – medical teams with more open and cooperative cultures would make fewer mistakes.

But when the results came in, they revealed the exact opposite – better teams made more mistakes!

Befuddled, Edmondson doubled down. What she eventually discovered is that the best teams didn’t in fact make more mistakes, they just admitted to more mistakes. Dysfunctional teams rarely admit to mistakes because they are afraid of reprisal.

“When the bad news starts pouring in, this actually means you’ve jumped over your first hurdle to success,” says Edmondson. “Rather than living with false confidence that all is well, leaders can instead get to work on what needs to be done.

The idea is to flip your thinking from ‘we don’t have a problem,’ to ‘how can we improve?’”

Mistakes are markers pointing you in the direction of a better process. Don’t bury them – build instead a culture where it is safe to unearth them.