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| Throughout my childhood, guided missiles enchanted me in a way that normally only ugly ducklings or pirates or talking vermin enchant a child. In fact, the very first nursery story that my mother ever read me was called Gordon the Guided Missile. When Gordon sets off, it sends out signals to discover if it's on course, and signals come back. "No, you are not on course. So change it, up a bit and slightly to the left." Gordon changes course and then, rational little creature that he is, sends out another signal. The missile goes on and on making mistakes, and on and on correcting its behavior in light of feedback, until it blows up the nasty enemy thing. As a result of making hundreds of little mistakes that could be corrected immediately, eventually the missile succeeded in avoiding the one mistake that would have really mattered—missing the target. When Edison first produced the light bulb that worked, he explained that he had made more than 200 attempted light bulbs before one worked. "And how," a journalist asked, "did you feel about all those mistakes?" "They weren't mistakes," Edison replied (calmly, I'm told). "Every failure told me something that I was able to incorporate in the next attempt." So, I want to suggest to you that unless we have a tolerant attitude toward mistakes, one might almost say a positive attitude toward them, we shall be behaving irrationally, unscientifically, and unsuccessfully. This attitude is especially important now because information technology is changing the world of business so quickly that mistakes are inevitable. Of course, if you now say to me, "Look here, you weird limey, are you seriously advocating re-launching the Edsel?" I will say to you, "No, Mac. There are mistakes, and there are mistakes." I'm not advocating we tolerate true copper-bottomed mistakes, like wearing a black bra under a white blouse, or, to take a more masculine example, starting a land war in Asia. What I'm advocating is a positive attitude toward mistakes that, at the time they were committed, did have a chance and that can teach us something. A tolerant and positive attitude toward mistakes manifests itself in two ways. First, in allowing behavior that may turn out to be a mistake. Second, in acknowledging the mistake if it's eventually shown to be such. Let's concentrate on the first, the need to take the fear out of making a mistake. I remember reading in the London Times many years ago that an Indian cabinet minister said, "While there is no cause for undue alarm, there is certainly no room for complacency." What is undue alarm? Well, obviously, alarm for which there is no due cause. And when is there ever room for complacency? Never, I suspect. So what this minister was really saying was, "While there is no cause for alarm for which there is no cause, there is certainly no room for something that there is never any room for." Hard to fault that. And, of course, completely bloody useless. The minister's statement reminds me of the English proverb: "The man who does not make mistakes is unlikely to make anything." Research has shown that high creativity stems from the ability to respond spontaneously to intuitions, without immediately imposing critical thought—in other words, playfulness. This ties in with my own experience of what makes a group function more creatively. People must lose their inhibitions, their fear of—yes!—mistakes. In fact, the really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea that sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which someone else misunderstood but in such a way that he then said something that really was quite interesting, which was picked up by someone else who combined it with an earlier idea, which most other people there had forgotten, all of which was reshaped by someone else, and so on and so on. This process is why I have always written with a partner—different partners, but always a partner. I'm convinced that I get to better ideas with someone else than I'd ever get to on my own. I believe that where creativity is required, although there may be ideas that turn out to be less useful, there is actually no such thing as a mistake. Now, to come to the second half of my argument—my tribute to Gordon. A positive attitude toward mistakes will allow them to be corrected rapidly. The problems come when mistakes are denied. You can't say, "Well, I got that right, so now I'd better fix it." When mistakes are concealed, lies have to be told. Now, lies breed lies. Once you have a secret, you have not only to keep it secret, but you have to keep the fact that you have a secret secret. The amount of lying required to cover the original mistake builds exponentially. This is the essence of a particular form of comedy that has traditionally been popular in Europe—the farce. A classic farce starts with the protagonist doing something that then has to be hidden from everyone else's knowledge, and from that one action the entire comedy unfolds. In America, you have a similar form of entertainment, usually called something-gate, where entire departments of government pass their working days trying unsuccessfully to conceal one key mistake. This type of comedy is less successful in Britain simply because the government there has much greater power to suppress the best jokes in the name of national security. The concealment issue is especially acute if people at the top of organizations make the mistakes and are determined to show they are infallible. I remember a TV documentary in which English and French schoolchildren were asked to name the most famous battles between their two nations. The English kids came up with a long list of battles, all of them familiar to me, and the French kids came up with a totally different list, none of which I'd ever heard of. I realized that in my 10 years of English history at English school, I'd never learned the name of an English defeat. Of course, if your national government is rewriting history books, you may get away with these mistakes. If your organization is in the marketplace, you can't. The question is how to get rid of the ego-driven management policy that says "the buck stops . . . right . . . over . . . there." Now, I'm not suggesting you simply get rid of your egos. After all, some of you may not be prepared to devote the rest of your lives to spiritual exercises. Instead, I recommend finding a balance between the need to have a tolerant and positive attitude toward mistakes and the need to avoid unnecessary hurt to egos—our own and other people's. I think there are four ways: The first is to learn this column by heart. It'll only take you a few days, and it goes down extremely well at Christmas parties. Second, persuade yourself, and others, that admitting small mistakes right away protects your ego more efficiently than running the risk of making a far more painful mistake later. Third, fight the tendency to identify with ideas. Our egos often become attached to ideas before we've really pondered them and decided whether we're for or against them. Maybe the problem is verbal. Think of this: If a thought enters my head, I then say, "I think that . . . , " and already that makes it feel like my thought, something that I possess, and something that anyone else criticizes only at the price of also criticizing me. I personally try to avoid saying, "I think . . . ," unless it means that I actually thought something through and am fairly sure that this is the case. I use a phrase suggested by Edward De Bono, "I po." I think it's short for "I postulate," but it simply means, "How about this thought that has popped into my head? I haven't thought it through. I'm not attached to it. It's not my property. Feel free to criticize it." Fourth, create an atmosphere of tolerance and positiveness toward mistakes by serving as a model. In the early stages of a discussion, say you don't know the solution. Then throw up a couple of ideas, and if after examination they don't turn out to be very fruitful, discard them. Better still, discuss a couple of recent mistakes that you've made and learned from. Any ego loss suffered is more than compensated for, in my experience, by the ego gain in showing you're the kind of person who's big enough to admit being wrong. British actor, director, and author John Cleese is co-founder of Video Arts, which offers video training programs. Video Arts' Web site is www.video-arts.com. Mr. Cleese is reachable through videoart@interaccess.com. |
