Demanding No Errors is the Biggest Mistake of All

Your boss is no-nonsense. Efficient, considerate, but he does not believe in mistakes. His philosophy: once is a mistake, twice is a choice.

What do you do? Obviously, hide your mistakes.

The truth for any leader: come down heavily on mistakes, and what reduces is reporting, not occurrence. When it surfaces, corrections may be too late.

Yet we all want a world without mistakes. Harvard’s Amy Edmondson spent decades studying failure, and found something that should unsettle every leader reading this.

The Question That Explained Everything

She began her career tracking medication errors across hospital teams. Her hypothesis was simple. Better teams, stronger relationships, fewer mistakes.

The data said the opposite. The teams with the best relationships had the highest error counts.

She almost dismissed it as a data entry mistake. Then she noticed one survey question, added almost as an afterthought. It asked, in effect, whether people believed an honest mistake would count against them.

That single question explained everything: the best teams were not making more mistakes, they were simply the only ones willing to admit them.

Bhopal

Bhopal is the starkest example of intolerance for mistakes. Union Carbide’s Bhopal plant had already leaked toxic gas before, once fatally, hospitalizing workers who were not even given protective masks. In 1982, workers protested the unsafe conditions. The company response: fire the two union leaders behind it. The protests stopped. Alarms that kept going off were waved away as false positives, and safety audits went unheeded, because the plant had already taught everyone what happened to people who raised a hand. When water entered a methyl isocyanate tank on the night of December 2, 1984, no early warning system was left standing. The leak that followed killed thousands and left over half a million people with lasting health damage.

Not All Mistakes Are the Same

But there is another side to failure, the polar opposite, popular among entrepreneurs and startups: commit mistakes, celebrate failure, fail fast, fail early. Is this better than telling employees that failure is unacceptable?

What matters is context. If an airline pilot says fail fast, do not board that flight. If a lab says it, join in gladly.

We should stop treating all mistakes as the same. Intelligent mistakes happen at the frontier of technology, and can become an engine of growth and discovery.

Here is the question for anyone leading a team: are you building people who avoid mistakes, or people who avoid reporting them?

Stories and research drawn from Amy Edmondson’s conversation with Shankar Vedantam on the Hidden Brain podcast.