Everyone makes mistakes. No matter how careful you are and how many times you check, mistakes happen. Even people we call experts make an average of 3-5 mistakes per hour.
Companies and teams are made up of people, and people create products and services. Therefore, the bugs and errors occur in products and services, and companies need to solve these problems (mistakes).
Companies can use strategies called mistake prevention and mistake management to deal with these mistakes.
- Mistake prevention: A strategy to prevent mistakes. A strategy that blocks the path to mistakes and demands that mistakes not be made.
- Mistake management: A strategy to quickly detect and resolve mistakes even if they occur.
In a famous hospital in the Midwest, in 2006, there was an incident where babies in the neonatal ward were given heparin 1,000 times the standard dose. Over a week, five nurses administered it to a total of six babies, three of whom died and the other three were seriously injured. What’s even more surprising is that there was a similar incident in the hospital in 2001, and as a result, the hospital was recognized as an excellent hospital because it operated a safety program. However, according to the investigation, this incident occurred because the hospital’s safety process was too reliable. The nurses, who believed that there was no room for error when the pharmacist prepared heparin thanks to the new standard operating procedures, no longer paid attention to what they should check when administering the drug. In fact, the method was effective until the accident occurred.
This example used the mistake prevention strategy, but another mistake occurred because this strategy was believed too much.
The nurses believed that the safety process was perfect, so they believed that the pharmacist would not make a mistake in preparing heparin. Nurses who believed in this safety process made a mistake by not paying attention to what they should check when administering the drug, and this problem occurred again.
Mistake prevention is a strategy to prevent mistakes, but it is impossible to prevent people from making mistakes. Therefore, this strategy is actually impossible to execute.
Mistake management is a strategy that recognizes that mistakes can occur at any time and instead quickly detects and corrects them before they get worse.
Mistake prevention often leads to a tendency to hide mistakes because people are often blamed and punished for making mistakes.
Mistake management often leads to a tendency to share and learn from mistakes because it tries to fix mistakes before they become a bigger problem.
Even experts make an average of 3-5 mistakes per hour, but the reason why companies do not fail and services continue to operate is that experts detect mistakes early and take quick action. Experts acknowledge that they can make mistakes and make efforts to detect and correct them quickly before they develop into worse situations.
According to Cathy van Dyck, Michael Frese, Markus Baer, & Doris Sonnentag. (2005) Organizational error management culture and its impact on performance: A two-study replication. Journal of Applied Psychology, companies that use mistake management strategies rather than mistake prevention strategies have a higher level of innovation. This study also found that mistake management strategies increase a company’s profitability more than mistake prevention strategies.
People learn a lot through mistakes. In other words, if you don’t make mistakes, you can’t learn. So, mistake management strategies lead to better learning. If the company tells employees not to make mistakes, it is like telling them not to learn. There are many studies that show that encouraging employees to experience various mistakes, learn from them, and teach them how to deal with mistakes is a more effective educational method. The company doesn’t need to encourage employees to experience mistakes, but it needs to create an environment where they can learn from their mistakes.
The mistake management strategy can be expanded to secondary mistake prevention. Secondary mistake prevention is to learn from the mistakes that have already occurred and plan to act differently next time.
To take a mistake management strategy, you need to quickly detect mistakes through monitoring. And you need to respond quickly. After responding, you need to learn from the mistake and take preventive measures to prevent the same mistake from happening again.
- Monitoring > Responding > Learning > Preventing
In conclusion, everyone makes mistakes. Even experts make an average of 3-5 mistakes per hour. People learn through mistakes. Rather than preventing mistakes, a strategy to manage mistakes increases the level of innovation in companies and increases profitability. Therefore, it is important to recognize that it is impossible to prevent mistakes and make efforts to manage mistakes. The most effective way to manage mistakes is to monitor whether mistakes are occurring, respond quickly when they occur, learn from them, and take preventive measures to prevent the same mistakes from happening again.
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