a mistaken quality

Mistake happen, we know this is a given.

As we have discussed before there is a value in anticipating the fact that mistakes will happen. This allows us to think about how we will recover. And this is important to excellence in execution. But there is another part of mistakes that we need to observe that is vital to our improvement

And that is to look at the quality of our mistake. There will be mistakes and we will learn from them. We need to review not only if we missed the target, but by how much? In sports the professionals are not the ones who never make mistakes but those who make mistakes that they can recover from much easier. The measure of a great performer is not only the quality of their successes but the quality of the mistakes. Call it a margin of error, or in sports terms a “good miss”; but no matter what you call it the key idea is to really observe your mistakes and see if they are getting better. This is the measure of a champion and this kind of observation is a champion’s skill.

So next time you make a mistake (and odds are I will make one before you!) take the time to acknowledge

1) that it happened
2) why it happened
3) how far off target were we

So the next time we make a similar mistake (and yes that will happen too!) we will look over everything again and see how much we are improving. If we can see improvement even when we have erred than you know that real change is happening. When our margins of error decrease we know that we are improving quality at every level. It is a wonderful lesson and learning moment if we are tuned in to observe it.

No one is perfect and no mistake is a total loss. We must train ourselves to take the opportunity from every challenge and the success from every mistake.