After a retrospective, it’s a good idea to write down the learnings and share them widely. A team growing hardy from its own successes and missteps is great, but when they can also help others improve or avoid similar errors, that’s even better. At the end of the day, a resilient organization isn’t one that never makes mistakes but rather one whose mistakes make it stronger over time.

Resilient processes also try to create repeatable best practices. Most of the work needed to make something happen in today’s world is staggeringly complex. Just imagine the number of steps it takes to get a plane to take off—the cabin must be cleaned from the previous flight, the jet must be refueled, passengers must be checked in, luggage must be loaded, safety checks must be done, and so forth. It’s near impossible to remember all the steps in your head, let alone try to improvise them in the moment.

The difference is the decision-making freedom we provide. If your employees are excellent and you give them freedom to implement the bright ideas they believe in, innovation will happen. Netflix does not operate in a safety-critical market, like medicine or nuclear power. In some industries, preventing error is essential. We are in a creative market. Our big threat in the long run is not making a mistake, it’s lack of innovation. Our risk is failing to come up with creative ideas for how to entertain our customers, and therefore becoming irrelevant.

When considering whether to lead with context or control, the second key question to ask is whether your goal is error prevention or innovation… But if, like Target, your goal is innovation, making a mistake is not the primary risk. The big risk is becoming irrelevant because your employees aren’t coming up with great ideas to reinvent the business. Although many brick-and-mortar retailers have gone out of business as increasing numbers of people shop online, Target has made a priority of imagining fresh ways to get customers into the stores.

Even at Netflix we have pockets of the company where safety and error prevention are our primary goals and there we fence off an area to build a little symphony orchestra that plays pitch-perfect rules-and-process.

Take, for example, employee safety and sexual harassment. When it comes to protecting our employees from injury or harassment, we invest in error prevention (training) and hotlines; we have strong processes to make sure all claims are properly investigated; and we use process-improvement principles to drive the incident rates down to zero.

“Use Systems Thinking to Change How We Think about Error …

Rely on inquiry

So Morath faced a challenge: How to help people to see and accept their hospital’s failures? Rather than doubling down on her logic—You work in a complex error-prone system, don’t you see? Things will go wrong!—she instead invited clinicians to reflect on their experiences that week with their patients, then prompted, “Was everything as safe as you would have liked it to have been?” Her aspirational question opened the floodgates. Most people had been in what Morath called “a health-care situation where something did not go well,” and

once they reflected on the many problems they had noticed, they became eager to talk about what had happened and how they might improve…

New language

Another element of the patient safety system was what Morath called Words to Work By—a roster of suggested terms designed to help shift mindsets from blaming to learning. Morath substituted neutral-sounding words such as study for the more threatening word investigation, which put people on the defensive…

Synergy…

As with the system at 3M that supported people’s intelligent failures in ways that encouraged product innovation, and the system at Toyota that made quality improvement second nature, Children’s Minnesota built a robust learning system that turned everyone into an active participant in patient safety. Morath’s approach reminds us that system design is more than simply coming into an organization and flipping a single switch. It’s flipping multiple switches understanding how they work as a system.