Mistakes and Creativity

I’ve taken a comment made by Abby Yanow and promoted it to a post, since it raises a new and important issue.

In response to our follow questions to the August meeting on “Creativity,” Abby wrote:

If we want organizations to encourage creativity, we should ask: How are mistakes dealt with in the organization? Is it OK to make a mistake? Are you yelled at and reprimanded? Are people encouraged to try new approaches to solving problems? Is that rewarded?

As OD practitioners, we want to promote learning organizations and invite organizations to devote the time space to addressing those kinds of questions, and others: What did we try to do? What happened? What worked well, what mistakes were made? What was the result? How can we do it better next time?

I think articles have been written about organizations that allow for mistakes. Anyone have such references?

To which I noted the following:

As to not punishing mistakes, I would cite Tom Peter's mantra "Celebrate Failure". Especially in his seminal work Thriving On Chaos, Peters gives many examples of organizations that have innovative and succesful cultures because mistakes are not punished but even encouraged.
Another good reference would be Richard Farson and Robert Keyes article "The Failure Tolerant Leader" in the August 2002 Harvard Business Review. This links creativity/innovation to permitting mistakes.

On reflection, I would supplement those sources with the following:

Tom Peters The Circle of Innovation is one the most creative books ever on that topic.

For a good short piece on “Increasing Your Return on Failure (ROF)” (a creative new acronym), see http://www.infosentry.com/After_Action_Reviews.pdf.

Abby’s point is very well taken. One of the surest was to promote innovation is to treat mistakes as learning opportunities, not as occasions for blame. Perhaps some readers can post some examples of organizations that succeeded by encouraging mistakes or that failed by punishing mistakes.