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.

Effectiveness, in other words, is a habit; that is, a complex of practices. And practices can always be learned. Practices are simple, deceptively so; even a seven-year-old has no difficulty in understanding a practice. But practices are always exceedingly hard to do well. They have to be acquired, as we all learn the multiplication table; that is, repeated ad nauseam until “6 x 6 = 36” has become unthinking, conditioned reflex, and firmly ingrained habit. Practices one learns by practicing and practicing and practicing again.

Practices for Learning from Failure

To Avoid

Don’t Say

Try

Skipping the analysis

I'll try harder next time.

Thinking carefully about what went wrong and what factors might have caused it.

Superficial analysis

It didn’t work. I'll just try something else

Analyzing what the different causes of the failure suggest about what to try next.

Self-serving analysis

I was right, but someone or something else messed it up.

Digging in to understand—

and accept—your own

contribution (small or large)

to the failure.

Embracing the Possibility of Failure to Reduce the Occurrence of Failure

My decades-long fascination with error, harm, and failure has left me humble about the complexity of these topics. The mix of factors—technology, psychology, management, systems—means none of us can master every aspect of the relevant knowledge to feel “we’ve got this.” But a few simple practices have emerged from my work that can help prevent complex failures. With these, we all have the power to make that kind of difference—in our own lives and in the organizations we care about.

A lack of situation awareness can spawn a variety of preventable failures—usually due to a cognitive bias called naïve realism. As described by Stanford psychologist Lee Ross, naïve realism gives you an erroneous sense that you see reality itself—not a version of reality filtered through lenses created by your background or expertise. It’s a source of overconfidence that can lead to preventable failures. Naïve realism makes us interpret a variable or novel situation as predictable. We’ve already seen examples of this with the child left in the taxi, or my classroom experiences, but perhaps you’ve lost a sale you thought was in the bag or believed a date was going well only to never hear from the person again. Overestimating a situation’s familiarity and underestimating its uncertainty sets us up for failures that are preventable rather than intelligent.