The next time a team or individual contributor fails spectacularly, put your criticism aside and instead ask them this question: What did we learn from this business mistake?
There’s little tolerance for mistakes in corporate culture, and that too is a mistake.
It’s obvious whenever two business functions have a clash of ideas. Sales and marketing clash over GTM and lead routing. Corporate communications clashes with marketing over positioning and messaging. There are plenty of other examples across business.
When I say “mistake,” I’m referring to conscious decisions to execute on a program that falls short of the objective. The conflict over outcomes that follows deters future experiments. It creates a culture where no one is willing to take calculated risks.
Mistakes are better viewed as opportunities. Even a failed experiment leads to knowledge and experience, which may provide long-term benefits.
Science provides a good illustration. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which was subsequently generalized, is one such example.
Einstein was a theoretical physicist. He didn’t conduct experiments himself; he figured out those theories by writing out math equations (which blows my mind). An incredible number of the predictions derived from his equations have been observed in experiments over the course of decades (such as that mass and energy are interchangeable, time dilation, gravitational lensing, and more).
While he didn’t conduct experiments himself, he did use the results of experiments to tinker with assumptions and variables. One assumption he made, which was counterintuitive at the time, was to assume the speed of light was constant. No one had thought to try that before his time.
One such experiment was the Michelson-Morley experiment, by scientists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in the 1880s. They set up an elaborate global experiment to measure the speed of light, from the Sun, as the Earth revolved around the Sun over the course of an entire year.
The hypothesis was that light from the sun from one vantage point would be slower and light from the other direction would be faster. Their hypothesis was wrong.
While they were mistaken, they learned something that would lead to a breakthrough in science with relativity: the speed of light was constant. It was counterintuitive at the time, but Einstein plugged that constant into his equations and the math worked.
Science celebrates mistakes and relishes being wrong because being wrong narrows the pathway to eventually being right. Marketing and communications should also celebrate mistakes. As PR people ought to know, it’s not the success that makes for a good business story, it’s the setbacks.
The technology world has adopted this idea too, with the mantra “move fast and break things.” Breaking things leads to new insights. Marketing, PR and communications should strive for the same thing.
The next time a team or individual contributor fails spectacularly, put your criticism aside and instead ask them this question: What did we learn from this mistake?
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