We never really discuss mistakes much because I think its human nature to avoid highlighting them in any way. In fact, most people get very uncomfortable at the mere mention of a mistake, especially in business, because it calls their own competence into question. Therefore, many organizations are doomed to repeat their failures.  I think most of you will agree that it’s more productive to recognize mistakes, make corrections and move on.

This week I was chatting with an old colleague from my days in magazine marketing. She was telling me how much our department had changed and then she brought up something I had forgotten about. It was one of the costliest mistakes in our department’s history and it was all mine.

In early 2000 I was a fairly new campaign planner for a large magazine with a circulation of more than two million. We were planning a subscription renewal test to see which price point attracted more subscription renewals. Oddly enough, you would think the lower price would win but that is almost never the case, but I digress. The test was going to go to about 100,000 subscribers and I was in charge of checking the art work and letter for all three versions to make sure they were cohesive with the various offers. For some reason, most likely because I’m a human, I missed the fact that the designer had put the same price point on all three versions. The mailing went out that way and the test was totally blown.

When I discovered the error I informed my boss, who then told her boss, who then told the publisher. I was never reprimanded, screamed at, made to feel bad, or anything at all. We simply had a meeting about what had happened and came up with a system to avoid the problem in the future. We wrote a new offer-coding system that allowed for fulfillment to immediately recognize an error in the mailing if one occurred. So in the end I really didn’t waste $30,000, I simply diverted the funds to be used in designing a new and better way of doing things. I like the way that sounds, but still I opted not to list that as one of my accomplishments on my resume.

I have to really credit the magazine I worked for. They knew mistakes were going to happen, but they also knew how to handle them in an effective way. I have experience in organizations where this was not the case. Instead there is a culture of fear. Usually this tone is set by the head of the company and it is made very clear that failure is not an option. Unfortunately, you can’t just say something and make it true, so despite management insisting on perfection, mistakes happened. Instead of dealing with them in an effective way, management came down hard on the offenders (or, human beings as I like to call them) and thus creativity, innovation and risk-taking was stagnated.

Have you taken a look at how your company deals with mistakes? Do you discuss them in an open and honest setting or are employees forced to hide from them, cover them up, or even worse, play the blame game? You may not have thought about this in the past, or even thought it mattered much. I believe it does. It’s all part of the culture of a company and ultimately, that culture is what attracts talent, keeps good people and produces results.

Here at Structural Graphics we make mistakes too. Gasp! Not all mistakes you can learn from, you just have to chalk it up to human error. However, there are those mistakes where we gain great insight into our processes and our people. We learn what we can and move on. Of course, as is always the case despite how we may feel during tumultuous times, the sun rises the next morning just as it has for billions of years.