The importance of learning from failure
This is my second post in a mini-series, “What do woodworking and running a business have in common?”. If you haven’t already, it’s worth reading the previous post where I talk about having the right tools for the job. This next post however concerns the second of three lessons I’ve picked up from my woodwork adventure on one of my favourite topics; failure.
With the upgrade to a nailgun, by my third table I was pretty confident that I would at some stage be able to make something that Mrs Combe would allow admission into the house, albeit a dark corner of the house where no one goes. The first one was ropey, it wobbles, the table top isn’t flush and it’s only a matter of time before one of my children require some kind of first aid after having grabbed an un-sanded part of it. That said, by the second and third, I’d manage to flush out some of the mistakes I had made in the first. The second one was wobble free, it didn’t have random nails sticking out of it and would not be considered a health hazard to the average person.
Matthew Syed in his well renowned book “Black Box Thinking” talks about the importance of learning from failure by not creating a blame culture which will erode any chance of people not learning from their mistakes. In our business, we try don’t get everything right all the time. We try to be experimental, knowing that some things will work and others won’t. When something doesn’t turn out like we expect, we try to understand why. When my first round of table legs were wonky, shouting at my hand and fingers for not hammering in nails with enough care was probably not going to help get to a better solution. Considered analysis of how I could improve my technique is much more likely to get a better result.
I’ve spoken before about one of my classic failures; not following the company “four eyes” principal and subsequently sending a piece of marketing literature to print which had a spelling error in it. The general manager who called me into his office at the time, to his credit, didn’t rip my head off for doing so (although he could have been forgiven for having that reaction), but instead wanted to understand why I didn’t follow the correct process that was well established. I learned from that failure, and I’ve never sent anything to print without someone else double checking it since.