Especially in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, no business leader wants to be seen as mistaken, or misguided, or just plain wrong. But running away from error is exactly the wrong response, says Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. Instead, she says, "every instance of wrongness is an opportunity to learn and to see something in a new way."
Human beings are never going to succeed in eliminating all error - it's simply not possible, and Schulz believes it's not even desirable. "I'd venture to guess that almost every innovation - everything we get excited about as a product or a process, from the iPad to penicillin - comes about through trial and error," she says. "The error part is important. When a belief fails you in the moment, one of two things happens: either you have no idea what's going on, and that's very literally the driver of innovation and how science works, or your belief collapses and in that moment, you see a new one."
In addition to fueling innovation, embracing error can also - paradoxically - help you prevent it. "The baseline position isn't 'We need to never make mistakes,'" says Schulz. Instead, you want to drill into the possibilities - if a mistake were to happen, when and where is it most likely to occur? "It's important to think about systems, rather than individuals," she says. "What allowed that person to make the error in that moment? Focus on creating great systems. If you're a boss or a manager, you need to create an environment where it's not just acceptable but rewarded to tell you about mistakes, because that problem most likely isn't a one-off, but is probably indicative of a flaw and a weakness in your company."
So how do you foster a corporate climate that has a healthy relationship to being wrong? Schulz offers four pointers for executives.
How does your company deal with being wrong? What are your strategies for preventing error - or learning from it when it occurs?
This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.
Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist who teaches at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out, and you can receive her free Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook.