Learn Faster by Failing Smaller: How Making Mistakes Can Become a Brilliant Source of Growth

WE’RE often told about the benefit of learning from our failures, but the reality is that it’s easier to say than do. Failure feels uncomfortable and exposing. Rather than sit in vulnerability, it’s much easier to move forward and replace reflection and regret with action and distraction. But leaving the learning behind means we miss an opportunity to grow.

Our career resilience relies on being able to navigate hard moments with confidence and control and become better because of them. Whether it’s a presentation that’s gone wrong, a relationship that has broken down, or an important deadline that you’ve missed, our first response should be to pause, reflect, and learn from the situation.

Waiting for a BIG failure makes it hard to develop this skill. Big failures don’t happen often and come with lots of emotion. Trying to change your behavior when you’re in the middle of a big failure can feel doubly difficult. It’s much better to look for smaller failures to learn from, also known as mistakes. Mistakes are a much easier place to start. We all make lots of mistakes, so we have many more moments to learn from, and they are less emotionally charged so reflection feels less daunting to do.

A mistake might look like sending the wrong information in an email, arriving late for a meeting or not having the right data you need for a discussion. Mistakes won’t be disastrous for your development, but missing out on the learning might be. Repeating the same mistake can affect your reputation and lead to small issues, causing more significant problems over time. Turning mistakes into learning is a healthy habit for everyone’s development.

There are two ways you can start to learn from mistakes:

1. Mistake meetings – these work well as a team learning activity. A regular meeting goes in the diary (monthly seems to be the right cadence for most of the teams that we work with), and everyone brings a mistake they have made. The mistake is shared, the team offers support, and a plan to prevent the mistake from being made again is co-created. The benefit of this approach is that the discussion creates trust in the team and means that everyone is more likely to buy into doing things differently in the future.

2.Mistake moments – this approach works individually or as a team and has created more immediacy than waiting for a meeting to go in the diary. With Mistake Moments, the reflection happens within 24 hours of the mistake happening. The mistake is either written down or shared with a group on the day via an online communications channel like Teams or Slack. A similar structure is used for each mistake: What was the mistake, why did it happen, and how can you learn from it. The benefit of this approach is that the weight of a mistake doesn’t sit with anyone for long, support is offered rapidly, and learning from mistakes can quickly become a routine.

The more regularly you reflect on your mistakes, the less exposing failure feels. Instead of moving on and leaving the learning behind, we become more comfortable with the inevitable change and challenge we all experience at work, and much more skilled at growing through what we go through.

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Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis are co-founders of the global career development company Amazing If, which trains over 100,000 people a year in partnership with more than 100 organizations, including Visa, Microsoft, Danone, Sky, Warner Brothers, Lego, and HSBC. That’s why they have written a game-changing new book, Learn Like a Lobster: Accelerate Your Growth, Achieve More at Work, and Advance Your Career (TarcherPerigee / Penguin Random House, on sale February 2024).
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