Making the Most of Your Mistakes
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
What dramatic real-world mistake opens the episode and why does it matter?
In 2009, British businessman Philip Davison Sebery was celebrating his wife's 50th birthday in the Maldives when he got a phone call. The caller asked for a business meeting the next day at 8 a.m. Philip explained that that would be a little difficult, seeing as he was 4,500 miles away from work on vacation. What are you doing away at a time like this? The voice at the other end of the line shouted. Your company is in liquidation. Philip thought it was a joke in poor taste. In an interview with Wales Online, he recalled that the caller assured him that it was no joking matter. Here's what happened. A British government agency had reported the demise of Phillips' 134-year-old engineering company, Taylor & Sons.
The government agency, known as Companies House, serves as a kind of registrar for British businesses. It said that Taylor & Sons, created in 1875, was being shut down. Turns out, a government clerk had made a typo. The company that was going out of business was Taylor & Son in Manchester, not Taylor & Sons in Wales. Philip felt sick. His company had been doing well. It had some 250 employees. Within days, he later said in that interview with Wales Online, his contract strived up. Orders were cancelled. Creditors demanded to be paid. The government agency did correct the mistake after some days, but a debt spiral had taken hold. In time, Taylor and Sons actually did go out of business. Not all errors are so consequential, but some are deadly and many have unpredictable effects.
Wouldn't we all prefer that governments, organizations, and companies avoid making mistakes altogether? That's an understandable response, but it turns out that demanding no errors might be the biggest mistake of all. Flaws, flubs, and fallacies, this week on Hidden Brain.
To err is human. When people work on things, mistakes are inevitable. This is true in our personal lives, in our workplaces, and at the level of public policy. Not all mistakes are created equal, though. Some failures are trivial, while others can be disastrous. At Harvard Business School, Amy Edmondson studies how failures come about and what we can do about them. She has surprising insights into how organizations and people should think about the mistakes they make. Amy Edmondson, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you so much for having me. Amy, as a young scientist working on your first major research project, you spent months collecting data from doctors and nurses at two local hospitals. The stakes here were high.
I understand that you were tracking medical mistakes?
Yes, we call them adverse drug events. So that is when something bad happens to a patient that is deemed caused by human error. And so I would get a phone call from one of the physicians in the study who would say, there's just been an event. And so we're going to take a look at what happened. And so I would hop on my bike and ride down to the hospital and I'd find myself in a conference room. And we would then sit around and hear from the perspective of different people who may have touched or been aware of the adverse event. and we try to truly understand what happened. So for instance, in one case there was a patient that received a drug called lidocaine and they were supposed to get a drug called heparin.
Now the two drugs were labeled similarly and they were in the same location even though they do very different things. Now in this case the lidocaine would not hurt the patient but the absence of heparin might have led to real harm. It didn't. So these adverse events didn't always involve harm, but they always involved at least the potential for harm.
Now, you became aware that some teams at these hospitals were making more errors, more mistakes than others. But besides tracking mistakes, you also were examining how teams functioned, and you found that some teams functioned better than others. Tell me about the components of teamwork that you measured.
Well, I used a classic team survey called the Team Diagnostic Survey, and it measured such things as the quality of interpersonal relationships in the team, the team's own self-assessment of how well they were performing.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:03
2
What dramatic real-world mistake opens the episode and why does it matter?
0:03–16:35
3
How did Amy Edmondson discover that reporting culture affects error rates in hospitals?
16:35–1:18:55
4
How can leaders distinguish between errors that should be punished and those to learn from?
1:18:55–1:25:28