Example: Celebrating Mistakes

Finance Corp’s customer success team consists of Alice, Bob, Charlie, Dave and Eve. They have agreed to start working with psychological safety, in the hopes that it can help their team grow and and have even happier customers in the future. They have chosen to adopt the tool “Celebrating Mistakes”.

Bob has set up a channel called #celebrating-mistakes in the team’s Slack workspace. Bob explains to the team that this channel is intended to be used for celebrating mistakes, moments wherein you learned something because things did not go as intended. Bob has started out by sharing the story of how he accidentally deleted the entire customer list once when the firm was starting out in the channel. Bob’s message reads:

”When we were just starting out, I was trying to clean up the list of customers, removing those that have stopped using our services. I opened our CRM system, and selected the relevant companies with the mouse. I hit delete, and did not realize that I had held down shift at some point, and marked the entire list. The entire list was deleted. Thankfully, I realized quickly, and was able to revert the change with CTRL-Z, before I closed the program. This, however, was pure luck, and from that experience I learned that we need a back-up of the list, and that we should always use the query selector instead of the mouse to select companies we want to delete, so that we can see the output of the query before deletion. Be careful with your mice!”

Throughout the week, the other team members chime in with their own stories, such as how Dave learned to use an automated form for sending his e-mails, after accidentally copy-pasting an e-mail to several customers, forgetting to change the name away from the original recipient.

Note: Not all mistakes are created equal!

The channel you will create should be used to foster constructive sharing of learnings from mistakes. These typically stem from certain types of mistakes, such as missing an opportunity in a complex problem, solving the wrong problem, misunderstandings, or experimenting with something that turns out to not work out as intended. These are all good grounds for learning and sharing.

However, the channel should not be used to mock or even celebrate mistakes which have no learning outcomes, such as dropping a cup of coffee during a meeting or trivial accidents.