Making the Most of Your Mistakes

**Shankar Vedantam** (0:00)
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 2009, British businessman Philip Davison Sebrey was celebrating his wife's 50th birthday in the Maldives when he got a phone call. The caller asked for a business meeting the next day at 8 a.m. Philip explained that that would be a little difficult, seeing as he was 4,500 miles away from work on vacation. What are you doing away at a time like this? The voice at the other end of the line shouted, Your company is in liquidation.
Philip thought it was a joke in poor taste. In an interview with Wales Online, he recalled that the caller assured him that it was no joking matter. Here's what happened. A British government agency had reported the demise of Philip's 134-year-old engineering company, Taylor & Sons. The government agency, known as Companies House, serves as a kind of registrar for British businesses. It's said that Taylor & Sons, created in 1875, was being shut down. Turns out, a government clerk had made a typo.
The company that was going out of business was Taylor & Sons in Manchester, not Taylor & Sons in Wales. Philip felt sick. His company had been doing well. It had some 250 employees. Within days, he later said in that interview with Wales Online, his contracts dried up, orders were cancelled, creditors demanded to be paid. The government agency did correct the mistake after some days, but a debt spiral had taken hold. In time, Taylor & Sons actually did go out of business.
Not all errors are so consequential, but some are deadly and many have unpredictable effects. Wouldn't we all prefer that governments, organizations and companies avoid making mistakes altogether? That's an understandable response, but it turns out that demanding no errors might be the biggest mistake of all.
Flaws, flubs and fallacies, this week, on Hidden Brain.
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**Shankar Vedantam** (4:09)
To err is human. When people work on things, mistakes are inevitable. This is true in our personal lives, in our workplaces, and at the level of public policy.
Not all mistakes are created equal though. Some failures are trivial, while others can be disastrous.
At Harvard Business School, Amy Edmondson studies how failures come about and what we can do about them. She has surprising insights into how organizations and people should think about the mistakes they make. Amy Edmondson, welcome to Hidden Brain.

**Amy Edmondson** (4:43)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Shankar Vedantam** (4:46)
Amy, as a young scientist working on your first major research project, you spent months collecting data from doctors and nurses at two local hospitals. The stakes here were high.
I understand that you were tracking medical mistakes?

**Amy Edmondson** (5:02)
Yes. We call them adverse drug events. So that is when something bad happens to a patient that is deemed caused by human error. And so I would get a phone call from one of the physicians in the study who would say, there's just been an event, and so we're going to take a look at what happened. And so I would hop on my bike and ride down to the hospital, and I'd find myself in a conference room, and we would then sit around and hear from the perspective of different people who may have touched or been aware of the adverse event, and we'd try to truly understand what happened. So for instance, in one case, there was a patient that received a drug called lidocaine, and they were supposed to get a drug called heparin. Now the two drugs were labeled similarly, and they were in the same location, even though they do very different things. Now in this case, the lidocaine would not hurt the patient, but the absence of heparin might have led to real harm.