The Many Errors in Thinking About Mistakes
... consider how we are taught to think of mistakes in our society.
"I think it's a very difficult subject," said Paul J. H. Schoemaker, chairman of Decision Strategies International and teaches marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "There's a lot of ambivalence around making mistakes."
On one hand, as children we're taught that everyone makes mistakes and that the great thinkers and inventors embraced them. Thomas Edison's famous guote is often inscribed in schools and children's museums: "I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that won't work."
On the other hand, good grades are usually a reward for doing things right, not making errors. Compliments are given for having the correct answer and, in fact, the wrong one may elicit scorn from classmates.
We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.
Carol S. Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has studied this and related issues for decades.
"Studies with children and adults show that a large percentage cannot tolerate mistakes or setbacks," she said. In particular, those who believe that intelligence is fixed and cannot change tend to avoid taking chances that may lead to errors.
Often parents and teachers unwittingly encourage this mind-set by praising children for being smart rather than for trying hard or struggling with the process.
For example, in a study that Professor Dweck and her researchers did with 400 fifth graders, half were randomly praised as being "really smart" for doing well on a test; the others were praised for their effort.
Then they were given two tasks to choose from: an easy one that they would learn little from but do well, or a more challenging one that might be more interesting but induce more mistates.
The majority of those praised for being smart chose the simple task, while 90 percent of those commended for trying hard selected the more difficult one.
The difference was surprising, Professor Dweck said, especially because it came from one sentence of praise.
They were then given another test, above their grade level, on which many performed poorly. Afterward, they were asked to write anonymously about their experience to another school and report their scores. Thirty-seven percent of those who were told they were smart lied about their scores, while only 13 percent of the other group did.
"One thing I've learned is that kids are exquisitely attuned to the real message, and the real message is, 'Be smart,'" Professor Dweck said. "It's not, 'We love it when you struggle, or when you learn and make mistakes.'"
LEFT: Dancing Star, 1999, enamel, ink and varnish on birch plywood, 59" x 72"
As we get older, many of us invest a great deal in being right. When things go wrong, as they inevitably do, we focus on flagellating ourselves, blaming someone else or covering it up. Or we rationalize it by saying others make even more mistakes.
What we do not want to do, most of the time, is learn from the experience.
Professor Dweck, who wrote a book on the subject called "Mindset" (Random House, 2006), proved this point in another study, this one of college students. They were divided into two camps: those who did readings about how intelligence is fixed, and those who learned that intelligence could grow and develop if you worked at it.
The students then took a very tough test on which most did badly. They were given the option of bolstering their self-esteem in two ways: looking at scores and strategies of those who did worse or those who did better.
Those in the fixed mind-set chose to compare themselves with students who had performed worse, as opposed to those Professor Dweck refers to as in "the growth mind-set," who more frequently chose to learn by looking at those who had performed better.
Mr. Schoemaker would agree. He was the co-author of a June 2006 article for the Harvard Business Review called "The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes." Among it's theories is that there is too much focus on outcome rather than on process.
If businesses and people are not making a certain number of mistakes, "they're playing it too safe," he said.
The resistance to making mistakes runs deep, he writes, but it is necessary for the following reasons, which he outlined in the article:
- We are overconfident. "Inexperienced managers make many mistakes and learn from them. Experienced managers may become so good at the game they're used to playing that they no longer see ways to improve significantly. They may need to make deliberate mistakes to test the limits of their knowledge."
- We are risk-averse because "our personal and professional pride is tied up in being right. Employees are rewarded for good decisions and penalized for failures, so they spend a great deal of time and energy trying not to make mistakes."
- We tend to favor data that confirms our beliefs.
- We assume feedback is reliable, although in reality it is often lacking or misleading. We don't often look outside tested channels.
Of course, there are mistakes and then there are mistakes.
"With children, you want them to make mistakes, but not end up in prison or in a wheelchair," Mr. Schoemaker said. One also has to weigh the consequences. We want people who run nuclear power plants or fly planes to avoid mistakes as much as possible.
But most of us are not holding people's lives in our hands and can stand to take a few more chances.
"Unfortunately, the people who most need to make mistakes are the ones least likely to admit it, and the same is true of companies," Mr. Schoemaker wrote.
Of course, there are stupid mistakes, or what Stanley M. Gully, associate professor at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, called "unintelligent failures."
After all, nobody wants a worker who keeps making the same mistake, and "if we fail and don't learn from it, it's not an intelligent failure," he said.
Professor Gully and other researchers have looked at ways of training people to do complex tasks and found that in some cases encouraging them to make mistakes works better than teaching them to avoid them.
Those who were good at processing information, open to learning and not overly conscientious were more effectively trained if they were persuaded to make mistakes.
"We get fixated on achievement," he said, but "everyone is talking about the need to innovate. If you already know the answer, it's not learning. In most personal and business contexts, if you avoid the error, you avoid the learning process."
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The previous text is excerpted from a November 24, 2007 Shortcuts column article by Alina Tugend in The New York Times. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company.
