Today’s Twitter Gem is courtesy of Jabe Bloom (@cyetain) who provided the following quote:
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes (Mahatma Gandhi)
My take from this – in the context of managing projects and more specificaly managing people – is the need to allow for and accept failures as a pre-cursor for innovation and creative thinking in project and non-project scenarios.
Think about it!
I don’t agree with the broad idea that we need to allow for and accept mistakes. This idea should be more narrowly drawn, to wit: we need the latitude to take risks, some of which may not work out, that are within the risk tolerance of the enterprise. How do we know what the tolerance limits are? We can ask, or by experience and intuition we learn/know the boundaries.
We also need the latitude to make tactical errors (mistakes in some cases or calculated risks in others) so long as we don’t make a strategic error. That is, we can be wrong tactically so long as we can recover and get back on a track toward the strategic objective. But to make a mistake on the strategic objective is almost always fatal.
We should also be mindful that — even with the latitude allowed for these classes of mistakes or errors in assessment or even judgment or risks gone bad — the cause or causality of the mistake is material. Negligence will never be tolerated; so also duplicity, though innocent ignorance may be ok. Thus, the same mistake (effect) with different cause may be tolerable, or even thought to be a good bet that didn’t work out.
Consequently, as in all ‘rights’, the right to make a mistake is not absolute; as a practical matter there are often many constraints to even a liberal degree of latitude.
John Goodpasture recently posted..Agile in the waterfall
Thanks John, I humbly accept and agree with your comments as I should have been more specific and to the point. I had in mind and should have made a reference to an earlier post (http://quantmleap.com/blog/2013/01/twitter-gem-approach-to-failure/) where the context was clearly set around the point that encouraging innovation needs to be accompanied with a more lenient and flexible approach to dealing with failure.