Fix business errors without affixing blame

Published 3:22 pm Wednesday, March 28, 2012

No matter what kind of business you are managing, you will undoubtedly see your share of mistakes. You may even make some yourself. It happens.

When we consider business mistakes from a management perspective, they generally fall into two categories: internal and external. Internal mistakes are those that occur but do not involve anyone outside the company.

External mistakes, on the other hand, do involve people outside the company, and most of these mistakes affect either customers or suppliers. In addition, there is a type of external mistake that spills out to the general public and is, from a management standpoint, a very different sort of animal.

Our management goal should be to minimize the number of mistakes made, and to reduce their impact in terms of both direct cost and indirect costs such as motivation and morale.

For internal mistakes, there are different ways to approach the issue, but one of the most effective for managers is to change the total mistake environment. And while it may seem odd, the best way to do that in most businesses is to address the post-mistake environment first. In all firms, though, especially those in manufacturing, overriding and immediate concerns about safety or costs may dictate starting with the physical environment where the mistake occurred.

The reason behind changing the post-mistake environment is to transform mistakes into learning experiences. The world today is moving so quickly that learning from our own mistakes isn’t good enough. We have to learn from the mistakes of others.

The way most of us react when we’ve made a mistake, though, gets in the way of learning from the mistakes of others. That’s why we need to change the post-mistake environment.

As in most cases, change is easy; getting it right isn’t. The management challenge in this case involves making a distinction between blame and accountability.

Effective learning from mistakes cannot take place, or even begin, in a “blame game” environment. That is one reason why so little learning usually goes on in Congressional hearings.

Unlike politics, in the real world most workers who have made a mistake feel worse about it than either their managers or their co-workers. They tend to beat themselves up about it, which in its own way is also a barrier to learning and certainly can be a barrier to productivity.

The initial challenge for managers trying to reduce the number of mistakes, then, is to set up regular meetings where mistakes are analyzed, without the corrosive effects of blame.

Meetings like this are still often called “post-mortems” because they are used, as autopsies are, to determine causality. It would be more accurate, though, to call them “M&M’s,” which is short for the Morbidity and Mortality meetings that hospitals use to evaluate patient care. Despite the gruesome name, which dates back to the early 1900s, they deal with living and deceased patients, and the purpose is to learn from situations where patient care had an unexpected outcome.

Spending some time at the first meeting explaining the reason for it helps team members get over any anxiety they might have. People are very sensitive about their mistakes, and often enough the more motivated and dedicated they are the more likely they are to become rattled by them.

Recognition of the mischief that a mistake can play with your head is behind a very simple action you can see in a college or NBA basketball game. If a player misses a foul shot, for example, often several of the other players can be seen shaking hands with him. It looks silly; as if they are congratulating him on his mistake, but what is really going on is preventive medicine. They don’t want him to become rattled and lose his confidence, which would affect his entire game, so the handshakes are to remind him that he’s part of the team and they still believe in him.

Managers have found that it can be very helpful to start the mistake review process with a real mistake made in the company — but not recently. It’s not generally a good idea to review recent mistakes until your M&M team has enough experience, confidence and analytical distance to deal successfully with them.

As your team becomes more analytical, it will become more focused on the future rather than the past, on fixing the problems rather than affixing blame. At that point, of course, the M&M meetings begin earning their keep and justifying all the time, effort and expense of getting them started.

There are many challenges for M&M meetings, but a lot of satisfaction, too. Unless your business never makes mistakes, you should consider starting them up. They really make a difference.

James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and small-business consultant. He can be reached by email at otisrep@aol.com.