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trying to increase discipline and accountability in the absence of a just culture has precisely the opposite effect.
Blame has other, more personal consequences, too, particularly in safety-critical industries.
when feelings of guilt are compounded by unjustified accusations of criminality, individuals can
be pushed over the edge. This phenomenon is now so prevalent that it has led to the coining of a new term: the “second victim.”
there is a broad consensus that it was a mistake to pin the blame on Stewart.
Because if pilots anticipate being blamed unfairly, they will not make the reports on their own mistakes and near misses, thus suppressing the precious information that has driven aviation’s remarkable safety record. This is why blame should never be apportioned for reasons of corporate or political expediency, but only ever after a proper investigation by experts with a ground-level understanding of the complexity in which professionals operate.
“But when I think about free kicks I think about all those failures. It took tons of misses before I got it right.”
sustained this work ethic throughout his career.
He was still working out how to improve, learning from his mistakes, into the twilight of his career.
“You have to keep pushing yourself, if you want to improve . . . Without that journey I would never have succeeded.”
Long term, going deep, iterating towards better, focused on the process and learning from it rather than the goal itself. Process as more important than the outcome, but the outcome as an objective or result that directs each iteration in the process. Feedback loop.
“The most important quality I look for in people coming to Dyson is the willingness to try, fail and learn. I love that spirit, all too rare in the world today,” he says.
Most important mindset when hiring and building company team
we looked at how blame can undermine openness and learning, and how to address it.
there is a different and altogether more subtle barrier to meaningful evolution: the internal fear of failure.
we are going to look at how to overcome both tendencies, which undermine learning in so many ways.
If learning from failure is vital to success, how do we overcome both the internal as well as the external barriers that prevent this from happening?
When we engage with our errors we improve.
The difference is ultimately about how we conceptualize our failures. Those in the Growth Mindset, by definition, think about error in a different way from those in the Fixed Mindset.
driven, in large part, by practice, they naturally regard failure as an inevitable aspect of learning.
For the kids in the Growth Mindset, everything changed. For them intelligence is dynamic. It is something that can grow, expand, and improve. Difficulties are regarded not as reasons to give up, but as learning opportunities. The children in this group spontaneously said things like “I love a challenge” and “Mistakes are our friend.”
For those in Growth Mindset cultures, everything changed. The culture was perceived as more honest and collaborative, and the attitude toward errors was far more robust. They tended to agree with statements like “This company genuinely supports risk-taking and will support me even if I fail” or “When people make mistakes, this company sees the learning that results as ‘value added’”
Indeed, a key advantage of those who excelled, according to Duckworth, was that “they were not studying the words they already know . . . [rather] they isolate what they don’t know, identify their own weaknesses, and work on that.”
Grit, once again, was the key factor driving long-term success.
The reason is not difficult to see: if we drop out when we encounter problems, progress is prevented, no matter how talented we are.
Grit, then, is strongly related to the Growth Mindset; it is about the way we conceptualize success and failure.
success requires long application.
It is worth pointing out here that giving up is not always a bad thing.
At some point you have to make a calculation as to whether the costs of carrying on are outweighed by the benefits of giving up and trying something new.
It is those with a Growth Mindset who are more capable of making a rational decision to quit.
As Dweck puts it: “There is nothing in the growth mindset that prevents students from deciding that they lack the skills a problem requires. In fact, it allows students to give up without shame or fear that they are revealing a deep and abiding deficiency.”
Acknowledging weaknesses as part of the growth mindset: assumption that identifying a weakness isn’t a failure, but a learning process and signal to move on to something else aligned with your strengths. To be able to admit failure, learn from the effort, and move on is the growth mindset.
they hate to crystallize a loss.
Important, aversion to loss and failure.
now suppose that we have already made a rational decision to persevere: the Growth Mindset now has an additional significance. It helps us to deal with challenges and setbacks.
James Dyson worked his way through 5,127 prototypes while his competitors didn’t get through the first hundred, not because he was more intelligent, but because he was more resilient.
we progress fastest when we face up to failure—and learn from it.
if we wish to fulfill our potential as individuals and organizations, we must redefine failure.
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently,” he said.
The problem arises, though, when opportunities exist and it remains psychologically impossible to even engage with them.
Self-esteem, in short, is a vastly overvalued psychological trait. It can cause us to jeopardize learning if we think it might risk us looking anything less than perfect.
What we really need is resilience: the capacity to face up to failure, and to learn from
Theories that have been through a process of selection, rigorously tested rules of thumb, practical knowledge honed through long trial and error and countless failures, are of priceless importance.
The scientific method is about pushing out the frontiers of our knowledge through a willingness to embrace error.
Criticism and dissent, far from being dangerous to the social order, are central to it. They drive new ideas and fire creativity.*
Creative leaps and paradigm shifts in science, business, and technology require a capacity to connect distant concepts and ideas. Once again, we can only do this by engaging with the problems and failures that fire the imagination.
the recognition that our ideas and theories will often be flawed.
When you have top-down approaches competing with each other, with a failure test to determine which of them is working, the system starts to exhibit the properties of bottom-up.
markets do: entrepreneurs competing with each other, with the winning ideas replicated by the competition, which are then improved upon, and so on.
They may have bold ideas, but they give them a chance to fail early through the minimum viable product (MVP). And if the idea survives the verdict of early adopters, it is iterated into better shape by harnessing the feedback of end users.
In other words, competition has favored entrepreneurs that take bottom-up learning seriously rather than those that do not.
The first and most important issue is to create a revolution in the way we think about failure.
that failure is a part of life and learning, and that the desire to avoid it leads to stagnation.
Once we have this new mindset, we can start to create systems that harness the power of adaptivity in our lives. What does this mean in practice? Well, let us start with how to improve our judgments and decision-making.
