Failing better

No project goes exactly as planned. Nor does a holiday, a house move, a year. What makes the difference is not who makes fewer mistakes, but who learns more each time.

In companies this attitude has many names: continuous improvement, kaizen, retrospective, lessons learned. Behind the names lies a simple idea: stop, look at what happened and change one thing for next time. It works at the office, and it works very well outside it too.

The cycle that keeps turning

The best-known way to describe it is the Deming cycle: Plan, Do, Check, Act. You plan, you do, you check what happened, you correct. And you start again, with one more piece of information.

The step people skip almost every time is the third. We plan, we do, and as soon as we finish we move on to the next thing, carrying the same mistakes with us. The check is the moment when experience turns into skill: without it, we are only repeating.

The home debrief

In projects, at the end (and sometimes halfway through) there is a debrief: a short meeting to understand what worked and what didn’t. At home, ten minutes, a sheet of paper and three questions are enough.

1. What went well, and do we want to do it the same way again?
2. What went wrong, or cost us more than expected?
3. What do we change next time? One thing, two at most.

After a holiday: next time we book the ferry earlier, and no three days of travel in a row. After a party: the cake gets ordered, not baked. After a year of household budgeting: September’s expenses need planning in June. Write the answers down somewhere you will find them again: a notebook, a note on your phone. It is your archive of lessons learned.

Look for the cause, not the culprit

A good debrief has one rule: you look for what happened, not whose fault it was. If the aim is to find someone to blame, everyone will defend their own version and nobody will say what you really need to know. If the aim is to understand, people talk.

To get to the cause there is a simple trick, born in the Toyota factories: the five whys. Start from the fact and keep asking “why?” until the answer becomes something you can act on.

• We missed the train. Why? We left late.
• Why? We spent a quarter of an hour looking for the keys.
• Why? They are never in the same place.
• Why? There is no place for the keys.

The solution is not “pay more attention”: it is a hook by the door.

Small steps, but always

Continuous improvement doesn’t ask for revolutions: it asks for consistency. One thing changed at a time, checked, kept if it works. Big transformations are scary and often run aground; small adjustments add up without making a sound.

It also takes some kindness towards yourself. People who experience every mistake as a personal failure soon stop looking at them, and people who stop looking at them stop learning. Samuel Beckett put it better than any manual: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”