I’ve made plenty of mistakes during my working life.
Some were relatively unimportant.
Others looked perfectly reasonable when I made them and rather less so with hindsight.
And occasionally I’ve learned far more from getting something wrong than I ever learned from getting it right.
But there is a condition attached.
First, I have to be prepared to own it.
We often say organisations should learn from mistakes.
Yet think about what we sometimes do when one occurs.
Who approved it?
Whose fault was it?
Why wasn’t it anticipated?
Who is accountable?
These may be legitimate questions.
But they can also teach people something unintended.
Don’t be the person associated with the mistake.
And once people learn that lesson, something interesting happens.
Information gets softened.
Decisions acquire retrospective explanations.
Responsibility becomes blurred.
People become careful about what they admit.
The organisation may still investigate the mistake.
But its ability to learn from it has already been weakened.
Human Agency offers another way of looking at this.
Taking responsibility doesn’t mean saying:
“Everything that happened was my fault.”
It means being willing to ask:
“What choices did I make, what did those choices contribute, and what can I learn from that now?”
That’s a very different conversation.
It separates responsibility from blame.
And that distinction matters.
Because once I can examine my choices without needing either to condemn myself or defend myself, a mistake becomes useful information.
It can improve my Response Ability.
I understand something I didn’t understand before.
So next time I encounter something similar, I have more awareness available to me when I choose how to respond.
Perhaps that’s what organisational learning really looks like.
Not eliminating mistakes.
Not pretending every failure is wonderful.
And certainly not removing accountability.
But creating an environment in which people can own their choices honestly enough to learn from them.
Publishing my Housing Market Case Study this week brought that question into particularly sharp focus for me.
Looking back across many years of attempting to influence one complex national problem, I became increasingly interested not simply in which decisions were right or wrong, but in something deeper:
How well do we learn from the choices already made?
The case study happens to concern housing, but I think the question travels much further.
Organisations, institutions and individuals all accumulate experience.
The important question is what we choose to do with it.
For anyone interested, the Housing Market Case Study and its short Executive Introduction are available here: Housing Case Study – Executive Paper
Because perhaps the real value of a mistake isn’t contained in the mistake at all.
It lies in the Human Agency we exercise afterwards.
Related Articles:
Responsibility Grows Where Agency Exists: Why Accountability Begins with Human Agency