I immediately saw that there was a significant correlation between the independently collected error rates and the measures of team effectiveness from my survey. But then I looked closely and noticed something wrong. The direction of the correlation was exactly the opposite of what I had predicted. Better teams were apparently making more – not fewer – mistakes than less strong teams. Worse, the correlation was statistically significant. I briefly wondered how I could tell my dissertation chair the bad news. This was a problem.

No, it was a puzzle.

Next, I define errors (synonymous with mistakes) as unintended deviations from prespecified standards, such as procedures, rules, or policies.

Chapter Two: Eureka!

“Mistakes are deviations from known practices. Mistakes happen when knowledge about how to achieve a certain result already exists but isn’t used.

Owning our errors becomes easier when we accept human fallibility as a fact and put that acceptance to use in learning and improving. In the most successful teams in my research, people, especially team leaders, talk about the ever-present chance that things will go wrong. They are honest and good-humored about mistakes, which nurtures the psychological safety you need for people to speak up quickly about them. This is a best practice—in families, too, not just work teams—if you want to reduce basic failures.

You didn’t have to suffer embarrassment or worse. Does this mean we’re able to look more dispassionately at near misses than at actual failures and are thus more able to learn from them? A growing body of research—some of which I’ve contributed to—explores this idea. What you can take away from this research is that framing matters. For instance, how did you think about that close call? Did you see it as a failure (a miss that almost happened) or as a success (a good catch)? If you’ve framed the close call as a success, you’re more likely to tell your colleagues or family about it, making all of you more able to learn from it.