The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better in a Fast World. Carl Honore
had a lot to lose yet still gathered together his entire crew and owned up. ‘I could have come away from this and not said anything, but the right thing to do was to raise it, put it into my report and get it in the system,’ he says. ‘I briefed the whole squadron on how I make mistakes and the mistake I made. That way people know I’m happy to put my hand up and say I messed up too, I’m human.’
This brings us to the first ingredient of the Slow Fix: admitting when we are wrong in order to learn from the error. That means taking the blame for serious blunders as well as the small mistakes and near misses, which are often warning signs of bigger trouble ahead.
Yet highlighting errors is much harder than it sounds. Why? Because there is nothing we like less than owning up to our mistakes. As social animals, we put a high premium on status. We like to fare bella figura, as the Italians say, or look good in front of our peers – and nothing ruins a nice figura more than screwing something up.
That is why passing the buck is an art form in the workplace. My first boss once gave me a piece of advice: ‘Remember that success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.’ Just look at your own CV – how many of your mistakes from previous jobs are listed there? On The Apprentice, most boardroom showdowns involve contestants pinning their own blunders on rivals. Even when big money is at stake, companies often choose to bury their heads in the sand rather than confront errors. Nearly half of financial services firms do not step in to rescue a floundering project until it has missed its deadline or run over budget. Another 15 per cent lack a formal mechanism to deal with a project’s failure.
Nor does it help that society often punishes us for embracing the mea culpa. In a hyper-competitive world, rivals pounce on the smallest error, or the tiniest whiff of doubt, as a sign of weakness. Though Japanese business chiefs and politicians sometimes bow and beg for forgiveness, their counterparts elsewhere bend both language and credibility to avoid squarely owning up to a mistake. In English, the word ‘problem’ has been virtually excised from everyday speech in favour of anodyne euphemisms such as ‘issue’ and ‘challenge’. Hardly a surprise when studies show that executives who conceal bad news from the boss tend to climb the corporate ladder more quickly.
In his retirement, Bill Clinton makes it a rule to say ‘I was wrong’ or ‘I didn’t know that’ at least once a day. If such a moment fails to arise naturally, he goes out of his way to engineer one. He does this to short-circuit the Einstellung effect and all those other biases we encountered earlier. Clinton knows the only way to solve problems in a complex, ever-changing world is to keep an open mind – and the only way to do that is to embrace your own fallibility. But can you imagine him uttering those phrases while he was President of the United States? Not a chance. We expect our leaders to radiate the conviction and certainty that come from having all the answers. Changing direction, or your mind, is never taken as proof of the ability to learn and adapt; it is derided as flip-flopping or wimping out. If President Clinton had confessed to making mistakes, or entertaining doubts about his own policies, his political enemies and the media would have ripped him to pieces.
The threat of litigation is another incentive to shy away from a proper mea culpa. Insurance companies advise clients never to admit blame at the scene of a traffic accident, even if the crash was clearly their fault. Remember how long it took BP to issue anything resembling an official apology for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? Nearly two months. Behind the scenes, lawyers and PR gurus pored over legal precedents to fashion a statement that would appease public opinion without opening the door to an avalanche of lawsuits. Nor is it just companies that shrink from accepting blame. Even after they leave office and no longer need to woo the electorate, politicians find it hard to own up to their errors. Neither Tony Blair nor George W. Bush has properly apologised for invading Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Remove individual ego from the equation, and collectively we still shy away from mea culpas. Britain waited nearly four decades to issue a formal apology for the Bloody Sunday massacre in Northern Ireland in 1972. Australia only apologised in 2008 for the horrors visited upon its aboriginal peoples, followed a year later by the US Senate apologising to African-Americans for the wrongs of slavery.
Even when there are no witnesses to our slip-ups, admitting we are wrong can be wrenching. ‘Nothing is more intolerable,’ Ludwig van Beethoven noted, ‘than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.’ Doing so forces you to confront your frailties and limitations, to rethink who you are and your place in the world. When you mess up, and admit it to yourself, there is nowhere to hide. ‘This is the thing about fully experiencing wrongness,’ wrote Kathryn Schulz in her book Being Wrong. ‘It strips us of all our theories, including our theories about ourselves … it leaves us feeling flayed, laid bare to the bone and the world.’ Sorry really is the hardest word.
This is a shame, because mistakes are a useful part of life. To err is human, as the saying goes. Error can help us solve problems by showing us the world from fresh angles. In Mandarin, the word ‘crisis’ is rendered with two characters, one signifying ‘danger’, the other ‘opportunity’. In other words, every screw-up holds within it the promise of something better – if only we take the time to acknowledge and learn from it. Artists have known this for centuries. ‘Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature,’ observed Salvador Dalí. ‘Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalise them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.’
That same spirit reigns in the more rigorous world of science, where even a failed experiment can yield rich insights and open new paths of inquiry. Many world-changing inventions occurred when someone chose to explore – rather than cover up – an error. In 1928, before leaving to spend August with his family, Sir Alexander Fleming accidentally left a petri dish containing staphylococcus bacteria uncovered in his basement laboratory in London. When he returned a month later he found a fungus had contaminated the sample, killing off all the surrounding bacteria. Rather than toss the dish in the bin, he analysed the patch of mould and found it contained a powerful infection-fighting agent. He named it Penicillium notatum. Two decades later, penicillin, the world’s first and still most widely used antibiotic, hit the market, revolutionising healthcare and earning Fleming a Nobel prize in Medicine. ‘Anyone who has never made a mistake,’ said Einstein, ‘has never tried anything new.’
Military folk have always known that owning up to mistakes is an essential part of learning and solving problems. Errors cost lives in the air force, so flight safety has usually taken precedence over fare bella figura. In the RAF’s long-running monthly magazine, Air Clues, pilots and engineers write columns about mistakes made and lessons learned. Crews are also fêted for solving problems. In a recent issue, a smiling corporal from air traffic control received a Flight Safety Award for overruling a pilot and aborting a flight after noticing a wingtip touch the ground during take-off.
In the RAF, as in most air forces around the world, fighter pilots conduct no-holds-barred debriefings after every sortie to examine what went right and wrong. But that never went far enough. RAF crews tended to share their mistakes only with mates rather than with their superiors or rival squadrons. As one senior officer says: ‘A lot of valuable experience that could have made flying safer for everyone was just seeping away through the cracks.’
To address this, the RAF hired Baines Simmons, a consulting firm with a track record in civil aviation, to devise a system to catch and learn from mistakes, just as the transportation, mining, food and drug safety industries have done.
Group Captain Simon Brailsford currently oversees the new regime. After joining the RAF as an 18-year-old, he went on to fly C130 Hercules transport planes as a navigator in Bosnia, Kosovo, northern Iraq and Afghanistan. Now 46, he combines the spit-and-polish briskness of the officers’ mess with the easy charm of a man who spent three years as the Equerry to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
On the whiteboard in his office he uses a red felt-tip pen to sketch me a picture of a crashed jet, a dead pilot and a plume of smoke. ‘Aviation is a dangerous business,’ he says. ‘What we’re trying to do is stop picking up the deceased and the bits of the broken aeroplane on the ground and pull the whole story back to find out the errors and the near misses that can lead to the crash,