Celebrating Mistakes

👥 Individual Setting | 🕒 10 min | 🔄 As occurs | 🛋️ Required Comfort: 2

Example

Use When

Your team wants to practice talking about failures in a way which encourages learning. This is especially useful if your team works with complex or error-prone problems, or if they are experimenting with new ideas.

Prerequisites

A team-wide text-based communication medium, such as Slack, Teams, Discord, or similar.

Tool Description

Being open to experiment and innovate comes with accepting that one might make mistakes, or that one’s experiments might fail. However, these mistakes often come with learning opportunities. Cashing in on these learning opportunities, and sharing them with the team, can help others stand on the shoulders of their co-workers’ experiments in their work.

Dedicate a communication channel, such as a Slack channel, only to celebrating mistakes. Inform your team members that this is a safe space, and that mistakes are an expected outcome of trying to innovate. Whenever such a mistake occurs, have the team member(s) write a short message in this channel, describing:

1. What they were trying to solve
2. What they did to solve it
3. What happened
4. What they learned from their attempt

Purpose

Sharing learning experiences, and establishing and documenting a culture wherein mistakes are expected to happen, and are seen as learning opportunities.

Outcome

Repeated use of the channel establishes talking about mistakes a part of your team’s culture. Over time, the channel will exist as a learning diary of the team, which can provide an insight into specific problems, as well as the team culture. This can also be useful for new employees.