Fear of making mistakes is one of the most significant stress factors. When people have made mistakes, it initially affects them negatively. They become more cautious, do not dare to try new things and take refuge in rituals – without any gain in knowledge and insight. Without mistakes in life, however, we do not develop further. This is because the discovery of a mistake creates a feeling of surprise, which promotes learning.
Making mistakes should therefore be seen as a positive process, for one’s own development and as motivation to search for and discover connections. So there are many things to learn from mistakes… why then do we try to avoid them? For example, the way errors are talked about in an organization reveals a lot about its culture.
If a company doesn’t value mistakes as feedback, then risk-avoidance is encouraged and mistakes are no longer used as an opportunity to course-correct. The system is no longer capable of learning.
Nature leads the way…
We know from evolutionary biology, which deals with the emergence of organically “new” things, that this new, deviated, untested thing will initially be less capable, will be a “mistake”. However, a different combination of external conditions may allow this new thing to be more “capable” in the future. This double capacity of organisms for error-proneness and error-tolerance is error-friendliness: a guarantee of survival.
Evolution, the constant adapting to each other and the common further development, is dependent on errors. These are systems that accept and encourage surprises, deviations and otherness. Error-unfriendly systems are practically dead.
As long as people can learn from mistakes, it is helpful to encourage risk-taking. Along the lines of “the stupid always make the same mistakes, the smart always make new ones.” Unknown
