Learning from mistakes

How a fixation with success can cloud the chance to learn from mistakes.

 

When a speaker is introduced before a presentation they’ll usually be hailed by a short run-through of some of their key achievements and career highlights. But Ion Valis MBA2000 is an exception. He prefers to list some of his lesser moments – like nearly losing his job as a press secretary on Capitol Hill in the first week (after forgetting that, when in doubt, “no comment” is the best thing to tell a journalist). Or failing to win two pitches for work that he thought he was going to get and desperately wanted to secure.

His aim is to set the tone for a consultancy session that encourages people to talk about mistakes openly and learn from them. It might be a one-hour keynote for a financial services firm or a one-day investigation into a major product failure, but he wants to create a safe space and a culture that allows people to embrace mistakes.

 

A chance to grow

 

“We tend to consign mistakes to the corners of our mind saying ‘I can’t believe I did that’, and we run from them,” says Valis who has his own strategic advice firm based in Montreal, with clients in North America and Europe. “What I want is to help people and organisations see mistakes as opportunities to grow, to progress, to learn, to get better, so that they see that mistake as a gift – a necessary part of the improvement process.”

And Valis is delighted at the way his clients have built the approach into some of their corporate processes. Some companies have a “failure party” once a quarter to talk about their biggest mistakes and what they can learn from them. Others include a mistake debrief in their weekly sales call. While a CEO of an IT company created a failure wall and pinned on the first note describing a mistake he’d made; by the end of the week employees had added to it, creating a huge source of potential improvements for the company.

 

Success culture

 

The mistakes-based approach is part of a fight back against an unrealistic success culture that Valis believes permeates our lives – from the way we run corporations to the way we raise our children. A culture that has taken over from the days when success and failure were viewed more equally, as expressed in the 1943 poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling which talks about treating the “two impostors” of triumph and disaster just the same.

“Today’s world lionises success,” says Valis. And he pins the blame on the emergence of the self-help movement in the 20th century. “Self-help is about making people feel better and that’s by giving them hope,” he says. “Hope comes from stories of success that imply, between the lines, that you might just be able to achieve them too if you follow the steps of, say, Dale Carnegie or follow the principles that Anthony Robbins lays out. So this is a relatively modern concept.”

 

Singular outliers

 

“The scale of success has made things worse in the 21st century,” he says. “Think of Mark Zuckerberg who has built a company, amassed a fortune the likes of which few people have ever seen, and committed to giving it away, all before he’s 32. Even Alexander the Great would have trouble compared with those sort of achievements,” he says.

 

“So we live in an era where that kind of success is possible and those stories make their way into the bloodstream and culture at a faster clip than in the past. Yet those stories are even less relevant to us today as they are singular outliers. If you said to someone at London Business School, ‘I’m going to give you all the reasons for Zuckerberg’s success’, it would be a wonderful story but what could they possibly use to their advantage in their own careers?”

 

Built on mistakes

 

“Stories of success are non-transitive,” says Valis; it’s difficult to apply them to a different situation and have the same result because they have strong elements of luck and serendipity that can’t be replicated. And what is often hidden is the number of previous failures they are built on – Zuckerberg himself has acknowledged the importance of mistakes. He was quoted in The New York Times saying: “If you’re successful, most of the things you’ve done were wrong.”

Valis – who describes himself as an ideas entrepreneur and a “perpendicular thinker” – first thought of these ideas in 1998 when he went to his first strategy class at London Business School and started wondering just how useful it was for him to know the lessons of why Southwest Airlines had succeeded: (“I had a little epiphany: This is a great blueprint to launch a low-cost, point-to-point airline; too bad Southwest beat me to it” – see story on www.london.edu/experience/alumni).

The idea stayed with him and he started writing a book about it in 2008 which was published last year as The Magnificent Mistake: How you can earn more from failure than you learn from success. It’s formed the key plank of his consultancy work for the past five years and has also spawned a workbook and a forthcoming app and TEDx talk. It’s a process that he credits LBS for helping him with: “I would never have had the confidence or curiosity to explore a topic that can be applied to business strategy had it not been for LBS and the intellectual foundations that it provided me in the two years I was there and all the years since,” he says.

 

The habit of learning

 

But in addition to a concept that he says is really as uncontroversial as “eating vegetables is good for you”, Valis has developed a more structured way of learning from mistakes. The trademarked M.A.S.T.E.R. Framework aims to make a habit of pinpointing and analysing mistakes to help people and organisations learn from the past.

“You’re never going to get to a point where you don’t make mistakes and it’s just a matter of learning from them systematically,” says Valis. “I use this model constantly, and, rightly or wrongly, life continues to provide me with fresh examples of mistakes to analyze!”