GA 480 | Learning From Our Mistakes with Mark Graban

I think the boss is wrong. What's the benefit or potential benefit of speaking up? The benefit to the team, the company benefit to the boss, really right versus the risk. And if people think through that dynamic and they have been punished or they just fear that they will be punished, they'll err on the side of keeping quiet.

Today I'm excited to welcome my good friend Mark Graben back to the show. Now Mark's been on before and we're gonna, we'll link to all his previous episodes here in the show. But, but today we, we dive into the whole idea and the concept of, of mistakes and what are mistakes? How can we learn from them? Mark's got a podcast. He's, he's written about it. So he's got a lot of really good knowledge to share as it relates to, to the whole idea of mistakes. And so it's a, it's a wide ranging conversation and goes in a lot of different directions. Mark was able to actually come in and we did this interview in person face to face in our studios here in Keller, Texas. So that's, that's always fun. So yeah, it was just great to catch up with Mark. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episode 480 and also if you scroll down all the way down to the bottom, you're going to see that little area about reviews. I was just checking them out the other day and there's been some really nice reviews. So I, I do appreciate you guys taking the time to, if you, if you like the show, you can give it five stars and, and you know, know, share a few words. That really does help the podcast kind of reach other people through the, the Apple and Spotify algorithms and all that. So really appreciate that. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Mark, welcome back to the show.

How are you, Ron? I'm great. It's good to be here. It's good to see you in person.

I know, man, it's fun to, I love doing interviews here in our studio. Don't get to do it very often but, but appreciate you carving out the time. So gosh, we were just talking about before we hit record, how many times you've been on the podcast. I didn't actually tally it up, but it's been a lot. And so we're going to get Jessica to link them all up in the show notes below and so folks can go back and, but boy, we've, we've known each other a long time and almost 20 years. Yes. It's crazy.

We discovered that we both lived in the same town.

Yep.

Right here in Texas.

Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, it's just time flies, too. My goodness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, anyhow, well, thanks for coming on again. So you know the drill. We like to get things rolling right out of the gate with a quote. So what do you got, Mark?

So I think people will know the name. I'm not expecting them to know the quote, but when I was doing research for the book, stumble across a quote by Akio Toyoda, who's now chairman, formerly until recently CEO of Toyota Motor Corporation. Here's the quote. It is in Toyota's DNA that mistakes made once will not be repeated. And so I just love the idea there. And, you know, as I had an opportunity to explore, you know, with some stories from Toyota people in the book, as much as the effort as they put into mistake proofing, they still make mistakes. And there's this really, it seems very healthy and productive culture of learning from mistakes, focusing on the safety to speak up, whether that's the andong chord or saying something. People listening probably know that element of the Toyota culture and organizations like them, making it safe to speak up. And then when the reaction from leaders is one of learning and improvement and turning that knowledge into future mistake proofing, like, that's really powerful. It's this combination, if you will, of psychological safety and problem solving. I think you've got to have both. And Toyota, there's so much emphasis, I think, in the lean community on the problem solving piece, reactive problem solving, continuous improvement, what have you. But I think, and part of what I'm trying to spur more discussion about is the important piece on psychological safety that people might take for granted if they've left Toyota and go into another workplace where people do get punished for admitting mistakes, for pointing out problems, for speaking up about ideas. And some of the Toyota literature does directly use that phrase, psychological safety. But I think you can also see just that being demonstrated in the way Toyota operates. That high level of psychological safety.

Yeah. It's one thing to say it because it's kind of becoming buzzwordy now. Right. It's real popular to say that. And then you're like. But really do it. Right.

Exactly. I mean, leaders and, you know, I've had a chance in the last year to formally study some of these psychological safety concepts, and more importantly, what leaders can do or must do to create that feeling of psychological safety on an individual level. A leader just can't wave their hands and say, okay, it's safe now. You should feel safe to speak up.

Yeah.

That may or may not be poster.

On the wall, you know, and. Yeah, yeah.

Because when people test that ide and they do speak up or pull an and on cord, then leaders have to walk the talk.

Yeah, it's my only. My, my whole hesitation with the whole psychological safety movement, which obviously I'm completely for. But if you think about Dr. Deming and all the, the original guys talking about all of our slogans and all this kind of stuff, it, you know, it's like, I hope it doesn't get to, you know.

Right. No, that's a great point. It's about the action. It's about what leadership are actively doing at all levels every day, not just what they're saying. And certainly it's not putting up the posters or having one meeting. This would be a problem with Lean. Right. We don't want Lean or Continuous Improvement phrases to just be slogans and posters either.

Right. Awesome. Before we dive into really the whole topic of the day, Mark, just in case people aren't familiar with who you are, which I doubt many people listening don't know who Mark is, but tell us a little bit about your background. Lean blogs, like the OG of our movement. I think if it's not the original, it's right there at the very beginning of the first Lean blog.

Well, it was early.

You coined the term Lean blog. Right.

It's alien blog, not the.

Right, Right, right. So tell us something about who Mark is.

Yeah. It would be a mistake for me to assume everybody listening knows who I am. So my name is Mark Graven. You know, my, my whole career, I mean, going Back to, gosh, 1995 when I started at General Motors, it's really been focused on continuous improvement or Lean manufacturing or lean management. By degree. I'm an industrial engineer, so I expected to have a career in manufacturing companies. I have master's degrees in engineering and an mba which was intended to help further that career in manufacturing. And then in 2005, my career took a detour. Opportunity a little bit. Yeah. To do work in healthcare. And that really has been most of the focus for the last 18 years. So I've been doing consulting, speaking, writing books that started off being very healthcare focused. Lean Hospitals, Healthcare Kaizen with Joe Schwartz. We've talked about that in a previous episode. Measures of Success about process behavior charts and metrics is incorporated into Lean management practices. But that book was the first time I decided I'm going to write a book intended for a broader management audience. And I've done the same thing here with the mistakes that make us. So Lean has been a big part of my career. Kevin Meyer, part of the team here at Gemba Academy, was one of the early Lean bloggers. There was a group, John Hunter, Curious Cat Blog, which is as much Deming as Lean. But I love that because my roots are endemic as much as they were with Lean. And then maybe, maybe mine is the OG Lean podcast, if I were to be so bold.

Oh, you were podcasting before. What's a podcast?

2006. And that was a gift. That idea was a gift from Norm Bodak, who passed away a couple of years ago. He said to me, and I'm really thinking of it now, the studio here, it's like being in a radio studio. It's a very professional. It's great to see your setup here. But Norman, we had done some text based Q and A interviews just through email, and I was publishing them on the blog. And Norman, he says, you know what you should do? You should do a radio interview with me. I'm like, I don't have a radio station or a radio show. And in mid-2006, I turned that gift of an idea, I think, Norman, there's this thing called a podcast. We're going to do a podcast. So that was the start of it.

Wow. I don't think I knew that story.

Yeah.

Wow. So good. So good. And then these days you're continuing with consulting and affiliated with Kynexis and lots.

Of other cool people. Lots of cool people doing lots of different cool things. So yeah, I'm fortunate. I get to do a lot of things. I do things kind of under my own banner, my own company, writing, podcasting, speaking, coaching, things like that. I also often partner up with other larger consulting firms on projects that require more than one person's help. And then like you mentioned, Kinexus, it's going on 12 years of affiliation with Kinexis. And I say that because I say affiliation. It's never been a full time job. It's been part time roles in different ways. Was able to take a small equity stake in the company. And I tell people part time involvement, but full time, full belief in the company as it's grown to about 40 people and it keeps growing every year. And really amazing to see what Kinexus continues to do to serve people. Not just in healthcare. Where that started when Dr. Greg Jacobson and I were on the podcast together. Our initial market was healthcare. But then we've expanded the serve as wide a range of customers as Gemba Academy does, different industries, and a lot of those customers are Gemba Academy customers. We should at some point crosswalk the list, but I know there's a lot of them that. That are already customers, and it's a great combination of the education that they're getting from Gema Academy and then they use Kynexis to help track and document what they're doing.

Yep. So something you haven't mentioned yet is I wouldn't call it new, a newer podcast for. At least as it pertains to Mark my favorite mistake. So such a cool idea and such a cool podcast. But let's start with. Because I know that was sort of the. The genesis for the. For your book. Yeah. But let's start with the podcast. Like what. Why did you start that?

So there's an origin story to the podcast that actually dates back to a book that I didn't mention. And I should have a book called Practicing Lean that published around 2016. Anthology, I think, is what they call it in the publishing industry because I wrote two chapters and then I got 15 other.

Yeah.

Authors to write a chapter. So the theme, one of the core themes of the book, Practicing Lean, was for all of us, myself included, set the tone in the first chapters of thinking back to a mistake that we made in the first year or two of our Lean practice, if you will, and something that, with experience and practice and what we know now, we'd look back and go, gosh, oh, I wish I hadn't made that mistake and how I was interacting with people or my use or understanding of Lean methods. And about 20 years into my own Lean practice, part of the genesis of that book was just some reflection around reminding myself, don't be too hard on people when others are new to a methodology or to a practice. And if they make mistakes that are born from enthusiasm or maybe they don't have the right coach helping them and they're trying things. And the reminder just again, to myself and to readers that hopefully we've progressed in our practice and we're not repeating the same mistakes over and over every year. So that had been in my mind, I've been doing the Lean podcast. And then I think it was like May of 2020. I wasn't able to travel for work anymore because of all of that. And a PR person reached out and was pitching a guest, and it was Kevin Harrington, who had been one of the sharks on season one of Shark Tank. He has a new book out with a co author about entrepreneurship and mentorship and would you like to interview him? And nobody that high profile, but I had said no to some guests who were pitched because, like, oh, it's interesting, but I don't know how to fit that into Lean podcast. So I started thinking, well, how can I say yes? So I reached out and I brainstormed with PR people and said, what about a podcast about learning from mistakes? And the PR people thought, oh, well, that's interesting. Kevin Harrington thankfully said, yeah, that's great. So he and his co author Mark Timm came on and I tried to coach them and prep them a little bit. Like, let's not have it be like a job interview question. We're like, hey, what's your greatest weakness? And there's some sort of just glowing kind of like, oh, I just. My biggest weakness is I work too hard and I care too much and I deliver results. Come on. That might not be very interesting listening. Kevin Harrington in particular told a pretty vulnerable story about a mistake he made. He was considered, love him or hate him for this inventor of the modern 30 minute infomercial. And there was a mistake he made and took ownership of, didn't blame anybody else. A mistake, a risk in his business he wasn't aware of, it almost put him out of business. But he learned from it and they made adjustments and they made sure that that problem, that mistake, wasn't going to occur again. So it was great in the episode and I thought, maybe we're onto something. But now the question is, how many other people can I find willing to share a story like that? Because it would be so tempting to only want to go on podcasts to talk about the success stories and all the victories. But I think somebody that what's he have to lose? I guess at this point in telling a story like that was one of my pandemic passion projects. And then last year, after 100 some episodes, kind of started noodling around with the idea of taking stories from podcast guests and that that was the genesis of the book project that we ended up decided, deciding to title the mistakes that make us, as opposed to calling it My Favorite Mistake the book or something like that. So I don't know, like, when you think about a book title, it could be, is it, is it good or is it a mistake? Or, you know, was the podcast title, yeah, good, I like it or a mistake. But here, here's the, here's the thing that I discovered though, and I've had guests, they say this and it sounds so obvious in hindsight like, if I knew it was a mistake, I wouldn't have done it. At the time, I'm like, okay, fair enough. We make a decision that we think is a good one, and then we get data or feedback or information. We maybe think that was a mistake. So the phrase my favorite mistake, I think is a good one. It's inspired by Sheryl Crow song From the early 90s, catchy hit tune My Favorite Mistake, which was about an ex boyfriend. So I think it's. Even though we're talking about professional mistakes in the podcast, the problem is if you search in a platform like Spotify especially, that has music and podcasts altogether, if you search for my favorite Mistake, the Sheryl Crow song dominates.

Oh, boy.

So it was. There's a bit of a search engine disaster is too strong of a word. It's not that important. But if I called it our favorite mistakes or something like with a little twist maybe. But again, how many people are searching for that exact phrase versus searching a phrase, you know, business mistakes or career mistakes, then. Right. The podcast would come up. So that's not what I'm losing any sleepover.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was maybe what I thought we could do, sort of just to kind of take it from here, is talk just more about, like you mentioned, psychological safety early. And something that I. That I think a lot about as it relates to that is when we think about psychological safety, we always think of others appropriately. But I also also think there's application to ourselves. Right. You know, as it relates to Some people can be extremely hard on themselves, like more critical on themselves. I'm so stupid. Imposter syndrome or whatever you might want to call it, what do you think about that as it relates to mistakes and, you know, dealing with that in particular in our lean movement even.

Yeah. I mean, when you talk about our own reaction to our own mistakes, not to try to punt on talking about psychological safety, maybe we can set that aside. But I think there's a topic that comes up first, is being kind to yourself. There's a chapter in the book, and I think there are threads throughout the book. Karen Ross actually helped me a great deal. I've known Karen a long time now. Her most recent book is the Kind Leader. Yeah. And really helping me understand the difference between, let's say nice and kind when you think of reacting to the mistakes of others. But, you know, I think first off, we can look at how. And I encourage leaders to think about how they react to their own mistakes. What's that inner voice saying? And you Know, a high percentage of guests will use language that's probably just not accurate of saying, well, that was a dumb mistake, that was a stupid mistake. Like, I don't know if that, that sort of, if that sort of self criticism is helpful. I think it's one thing, I think it's helpful to acknowledge the mistake. It's a fact, it's a noun, it exists. We don't have to beat ourselves up over it. Kind of like I think Toyota would use the word problem, but that, that can be a very loaded word in some settings and some varieties. The thing about mistakes, so to be kind to ourselves, or some people might use the language, show yourself some grace. I was saying, look, I, I made a decision hours ago, days ago, years ago, I made a decision that I thought was good and something about that turned out to not work out the way I predicted. Thinking of language Toyota, people use about defining a gap, I think sometimes we discover that a decision or an action was a mistake because at some point down the road we see a gap between what we expected to happen and what actually happened. So I think we can acknowledge the fact of that and then step back and ask, well, okay, well, why did I make that decision? Why did I think that was a good decision at the time? Was there an assumption that turned out to be true? Like sometimes, especially if you're doing, you know, innovative, entrepreneurial things, you don't have data or knowledge, you are making an assumption, you're making a prediction, you go test your hypothesis and you can learn and adjust. And I think if, you know, if people are in denial or stubborn about the mistake and they don't want to admit it, then, you know, they're going to, they're going to keep down a bad path. But then there's the workplace dynamic of how do we react to other people's mistakes? And that's really, I think, more of where the psychological safety topic comes in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I also, you, you touched on it right there at the end. I feel like pride and humility are such a, they're at war with one another. Right. When it comes to, to mistakes and being able to handle that, handle mistakes well, if you will. I don't know if that's the right language, but you think, you know what I mean. Yeah. The proud, the arrogant, even sometimes, you know, it's just really difficult for them to reconcile that things didn't go because that means that they're not all knowing. And, you know, and so humility, I think, plays such an important role and really all phases of life, not just continuous improvement.

But that word humility, you look at how often that comes up in Toyota literature and what's taught and discussed within the company. Former Toyota people will talk about that emphasis on leading with humility. Like, okay, well now what, what does that mean? Like we know what the word means, but what's the practice of leading with humility? And I think it includes things like recognizing when we know something and when we're filling in a lack of knowledge with an assumption. Right? So Toyota people do this. I'm sure you've been, you know, subjected to this in a constructive way. You'll say something. The follow up question is how do you know that to be true? Do we know that or are we making an assumption? Is there a hypothesis? So I think humility leaves open the idea could be wrong. I got an idea, let's go test that idea. Instead of saying, I'm all knowing, I know this is going to work, let's go implement my idea. Now. Think of it. In a workplace dynamic, if you've got a leader, a boss who is always right, will be defensive or spin things, never admit a decision was bad, and then that's really going to stifle or hurt any feeling of psychological safety that others have, might have to speak up and disagree. If you're the leader and you've got a bad idea and nobody challenges you on that bad idea, that's going to lead to worse results for the business. So I think that's where psychological safety, it's not just a nice thing to do. There's a lot of research from Amy Edmondson and others that would point to the direct impact on business results, higher levels of psychological safety. When people feel safe to speak up about not knowing something, asking for clarification, admitting a mistake, pointing out a problem, disagreeing with the boss. Like when people feel safe to do those things without being punished, whether that means being fired, just being politically marginalized, ridiculed or ignored. Oh yeah, being ignored likes to be the worst of all, can be bad too. When people feel, and I know I'm an engineer, I'm still self conscious, recovering engineer. I'm saying the word feels a lot, but that's exactly what it is, right? It's a, it's an individual feeling or perception that we each come to a conclusion about. So like when we're in a situation and we're thinking about, huh, I think the boss is wrong. I really, is it worth, you know, you may or may not have time to debate this, right? Like, what's the benefit or potential benefit of speaking up? The benefit to the team, the company benefit to the boss, really. Right. Versus the risk.

Yeah.

And if people think through that dynamic and they have been punished or they just fear that they will be punished, they'll err on the side of keeping quiet. They'll protect themselves. And I totally understand that.

Yeah.

So. And that's where I think, you know, it's important. One thing I've learned, and I try to pass along, is that instead of. And I hear talk like this in healthcare, sometimes nurses get told things like, you should speak up. You should be brave. It's your professional responsibility to speak up if that surgeon's about to make a mistake. All right. I think life's more complicated than that. Right. If the nurse speaks up, gets in trouble, doesn't get the prime assignments anymore, is that hurting their career? Or they could be fired. It's not fair to ask people to put their paycheck on the line, to speak up in ways that are not expected to be safe. Right. So instead of telling people, you should be courageous, you should be brave, it's a matter of character. It's really more a matter of culture and what leaders are doing.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious, maybe if you could talk a little bit. Obviously, deep, deep experience in the healthcare community, and I would guess some of our listeners have that, but maybe most don't. How do you see things like psychological safety, for lack of a better phrase, or even just dealing with mistakes? Well, and just having that culture where it is okay to do it, is it pretty good, or is it. I mean, just anecdotally, what do you think?

Anecdotally, my default assumption would be that psychological safety is lacking until demonstrated otherwise. Sadly, you know, it's just too many environments in healthcare that are still very hierarchical, very much focused on blaming individuals for systemic mistakes. When I first got into healthcare, noticed this pattern of people would describe what happens in healthcare when something goes wrong. Naming, blaming, and shaming. I can't tell you how many times I've heard those three words strung together. The default reaction is naming, blaming, and shaming. And unfortunately, in recent years, sometimes that's not just a matter of losing your job or losing your license. I think this has been a great injustice. Pharmacists or nurses being prosecuted, convicted, and jailed for being. This is how I would state it, for being involved in a systemic error, which is different than saying they made a mistake. It's more complicated than that. So it's unfortunate in healthcare that that still seems to be the norm. There are happy examples of organizations with leaders who have realized we're going to change that. There are people who've been advocating for decades about Dr. Don Berwick is one of kind of the heroes of the healthcare quality movement. He learned directly from W. Edwards Deming. So here's the Deming name again. He published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, it was in the late 80s, writing about the need to stop blaming bad apples for systemic problems. So there are people who've been advocating for this for a very long time, saying there are things we can learn from manufacturing. Like in that article, Dr. Berwick, again, as an MD kind of lays out for the reader who's probably never been in a factory. Imagine two factories and it kind of lays out. And in my mind, it's like General Motors, where I started my career, versus Toyota, realizing Toyota's not perfect. And there's this idealized version of what they would say their culture and management behaviors need to be. But he's kind of laying out this case. Which do you think would be better? And clearly it's the environment that focuses on systems and making it safe for people trying to think how directly he made this point. But so again, in that context of naming, blaming and shaming, being punished as a bad apple, that's going to make people very hesitant about speaking up. Like one of my guests on the podcast, Dr. David Mayer and his stories in the book. The long story short of it is he was a resident anesthesiologist in the operating room. So you've got double hierarchies, right? He's lower in the pecking order, surgeon being higher than anesthesiologists. And then he's a resident, so then he's lower in the pecking order compared to an attending. And basically the resident surgeon cut into the wrong side of the patient. And yeah, like there's that. That should not happen. That kind of mix up. This is, you know, process problems, communication problems. Why was the attending not directly supervising the resident surgeon? And I'm not blaming the resident surgeon. Right. But. So how could this happen? But then Dr. Mayer told the story of how. So there was the mistake, the slip up. Then there was the decision afterward to lie to the patient.

Oh, boy.

The attending surgeon, I believe, telling the patient, basically, it was supposed to be a hernia surgery. It's your lucky day. We also found a hernia on the other side and we fixed it.

Oh, boy.

Because there was no, I mean, there was an incision, there was a Second incision. There was no pretending that that didn't happen. And so then Dr. Mayer regretted, and he talked about this in the podcast. And there's just a question of saying, hey, don't be too hard on yourself when you are working in a system, in a workplace with low levels of psychological safety. He's correct in saying that would have been a very career limiting move to have told the truth to the patient, even though he felt like that was the right thing to do. And part of him wanted to another, the other side, I think, understandably chose to protect himself and just move on. But as awful as that situation was, he called that his favorite mistake because it really sparked this passion around patient safety. And he's now one of the leaders 30 some years later, I think, national leaders in the patient safety movement. And as he said, observing that and living through that was eye opening because they didn't prepare him for that in medical school to talk about what happens when there is a mistake. And so he had to learn, in a way, kind of the hard way through this experience. And he has that regret. But I think he channeled what he learned there into some very positive directions.

Now, he shared the story on a podcast and in a book. So did they ever come clean with the patient or.

Oh, I'm sure they did not. And listening, like, wait a minute. Well, I mean, I don't know. I mean, the patient might not be alive, but I mean, they didn't name names about where or who. It's like the one scene in the movie Fight Club where Edward Norton Jr. S character is talking about cars and the recall. We don't do the recall. And the woman's shocked next to him and says, what? What company do you work for? And he says, a major one. And unfortunately, I mean, like, that story could have happened and is probably still happening in hospitals in the US Back to the Akio Toyota quote. What if hospitals had a DNA of saying a mistake once made, is never repeated? Not because we fired the person who made the mistake, because that's not what Toyota's doing. They're learning. They're looking for a root cause. What are countermeasures that we can take?

Right.

What mistake proofing can we put in place? That just hasn't been the culture in healthcare, unfortunately. We're still working on that.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow, that got gloomy. Sorry.

No, yeah, that's my mistake. It's the reality of the world, man.

You know, I think you asked me about healthcare not to blame you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome.

But but there are organizations that are to give credit where it's due, trying to create that environment of psychological safety and working on the two pieces of it. Right. There are hospitals like Virginia Mesa Medical center in Seattle. There's one I visited in Japan years ago that realized the number of incident reports, like near misses or mistakes or harm or was being severely underreported. I think data today says basically, you know, only 1 in 10 gets reported. And these organizations both focused on encouraging people to speak up and reacting constructively when people do. And you can see the charts, they're very proud. The number of incident reports going up in a very linear way, not because there's more incidents. Remember, this is the number reported.

Yeah.

Right. So then that's the psychological safety piece. But then you've got to follow it up with problem solving because at some point that line's going to start going down.

Yeah.

Because we're fixing things. So if you have psychological safety without the problem solving, people are going to be safely reporting the same mistakes over and over and not being punished repeatedly for the same mistakes. That's where we've got to have good problem solving to turn reporting into improvement and prevention.

Wow, that's a lot. Talk a little bit maybe, as we wrap things up, maybe some practical tips for folks that are listening right now. And boy, they, they want to, you know, what can. They can control. They can't control their boss. Right. They can't control their company that they work at. But maybe speak to individuals like, what can you do as an individual?

So I, I've done some things as an individual that, at least for me, I think have been helpful. 1. I think I've done it a couple of times. Even in our conversation here. It's just calling out a mistake when it happens, like not to make a big deal about it or beat myself up because, you know, not all mistakes are created equally. Right. Some mistakes are okay. No, no big deal. But to acknowledge it, to call it out, even just in your head or to somebody like. Okay, no, no, I'm sorry, no, my mistake. Just acknowledge it and that's okay. I think just to maybe normalize some of that, I think that's helped me take some of the emotional load off of things. I'm still working on this, though. Right. So as you know, somebody who's been. Ron, you've been involved with websites and different technical things on your own, and now through Gemba Academy, I made a mistake about two weeks ago where I was trying to work on some updates.

Yeah.

On my website And I accidentally pushed the live production site down to the staging site when I meant to be promoting the staging site to be the live website. That was a mistake. I will admit to feeling bad about that.

I thought you were going to talk about the QR code.

Oh, I mean, I should. How long of a podcast? Let's talk about Mark's Mustang. And I made mistakes, so I was able to solve that. But it took maybe two hours of my time to unpack that. But I can think, I think kind of to me, focusing on the forward progress of understanding, how did that happen? What am I learning from that? What am I going to do differently? I made a mistake in setting up something around a webinar. And so I took that learning and I go and update our checklist. So now next time, if I'm following the checklist, if I'm not making the mistake of getting cocky, say, I don't need the checklist. That's when problems start popping back up. I think taking that positive action allows you to maybe set aside some of the feeling bad. So that's a couple different things. I think there's two things you could keep a log of mistakes. Just even think through what I thought was going to happen, what actually happened, and I think we can become a little bit more aware. Back to that point of do I know or am I assuming? Am I implementing something or am I running an experiment? Just keeping that separate, I think can be really helpful. Making the mistake of forgetting is just human error. There was one other kind of, oh, having. I mean, this is stuff that you would learn from, you know, lean startup circles and other settings of like keeping an experiment log. And I've done this with some people I've worked with, have just kind of just laying it out there in a little spreadsheet grid. Here's what we're trying, here's what we expect to happen. And then at some point we realize, okay, well, I mean, it's a PDSA cycle to sort of documented of did we get the results we expected? If not, why do we learn from it? Or like, okay, let's not repeat that experiment again. If we spent money on online promotion of a LinkedIn post and it didn't drive many webinar registrations, like, okay, well, we tried that. We can acknowledge that it's okay, we can learn from it. That's better than forgetting. Like, huh, like three months from now we're going to do another webinar, like, let's run ads. How did that work? And just not having the discipline of sort of keeping track some of these things. But again, I think it requires psychological safety within a small team or within an organization to feel safe to run experiments like reasonable experiments, where people would agree the hypothesis is solid enough, but we don't know for sure. So let's go run the experiment. If you have a culture where people can't admit mistakes, that's going to lead to a lot of bad results. If you have a culture where every experiment has to work out, that's counterproductive. And I wrote something similar. But then Rich Sheridan from Menlo Innovations, who I interviewed recently, even though he's an Ann Arbor guy. Oh, yeah, that doesn't bother you too. Don't worry.

Don'T bring it up.

Not making an Ohio versus Michigan thing. Sorry, my mistake. But what was my hypothesis in saying that? But anyway, what Rich said, basically, if you know the outcome of the experiment in an advance, that's not really an experiment.

Yeah. So I think that could be confirmation study.

Right.

Like, you know, you'll see that in statistics, somebody builds a regression model and they're like, if you do this, this, this isn't that we should get this. Yeah, okay, we'll do that. Let's try it.

You know, but, you know, even if you're running an experiment with, I don't know, a 95% estimate, that I feel really certain about our hypothesis, but leaving open that possibility that there's something you didn't know, something you didn't anticipate this opportunity to learn, instead of calling it a quote unquote failed experiment. Exactly. How do we turn that into learning?

One thing also, that just my. My 2 cents on dealing with mistakes in particular ones that you know, in that are impacting others. Like I had recently, like I blew it with a couple colleagues and that worked for me and I handled a situation really badly and, and I wasn't like yelling or screaming or anything, but I just didn't handle it like I wish I would had. And I went back and I said I was sorry and I meant it.

Yeah.

You know, and I think contrition, real genuine contrition is so important, you know, when you harm others. Right. I mean, obviously you need to be.

Sorry or don't pretend people will accept a sincere apology. And it can't be couched in this language of like, well, if you were upset by this, I apologize. There can't be ifs or qualifiers. You need to say, and this is where like so many of my guests are my favorite mistake. Incredibly successful people set this example of Basically, you know, owning the decision, owning the mistake. If it was, you know, let's say a behavior mistake and giving a sincere apology, I think the recovery from that can help your workplace relationships. We shouldn't be creating situations just to be able to give a good apology and then try to end up better off than if we hadn't made that mistake. But I appreciate you reflecting and being able to share a little bit. Maybe we can get you on my favorite mistake.

Yeah, yeah, man.

Not necessarily that story, whatever story you want to tell. That was maybe more. More like my most recent mistake.

Right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, and speaking of Toyota family, I can't remember. It was, I don't. It was several years ago when Toyota had some huge quality issue or something like that, and one of the Toyota family members got up and basically just said, I'm sorry. That's how he opened.

Right.

Remember that?

That might have been in front of Congress.

I might have been. Yeah, yeah. And he just said, I'm sorry. And he kind of put his head down, he paused and then he continued, you know, And I was like, whoa, man, that's powerful. That is powerful. And he meant it, you know, he meant it.

Yeah. So like I said, it's gotta be sincere, it's gotta be heartfelt. But again, like moving beyond the apology to good problem solving. Yeah, right. And if you go back and look at the history of, you know, the accusations around unintended acceleration and, you know, there were certain things, allegations I think around, you know, the, the electronic throttle that maybe didn't turn out to be true, but there were problems with the floor mats. Right. Double floor mats being installed by dealers which are kind of Toyota but not really Toyota, you know, and accelerator pedals getting stuck and, you know, Toyota did, you know, my recollection of it was they, they were trying to be fact based and investigate things, but they weren't being dismissive or just blaming the consumer or blaming the dealers. I remember their contrition and countermeasures around. I think they pointed to the communication was very slow or that too many decisions were being made back in Japan and they made some structural changes to be able to make more decisions locally. Here in North America, nobody's perfect. But I think when we make a mistake, hopefully it's safe to admit it. I think if you're the boss, it's safer for you to admit the mistake and try to be constructive and then that sets an example where you can invite your employees to admit their mistakes and then react constructively and it helps continue that cycle that builds psychological safety.

Yeah. Awesome, Mark. How can folks connect with you, learn more about the book, all that kind of good stuff?

I'm, yeah, obnoxiously easy to find online. People can go to markgrabin.com they can find me on LinkedIn. My name's Unique enough. I'm pretty easy to find. If people Google me and spell the name approximately, correct the podcast. My favorite mistake. If I can plug that again, you can find that podcast wherever you're listening to this podcast. And then the book the Mistakes that Make Us. And the subtitle is Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation. They can find that primarily through Amazon, but it'll be Kindle, paperback, hardcover. And then, if I can ever avoid allergies to where my voice is clear enough for a long enough time, I'm going to record an audiobook.

Nice.

Because compared to the Measures of Success, too many charts. Like, people asked if I would do an audiobook. I don't know if that's possible, but this time this book is perfect. Nothing but words. I can do an audiobook. Great. Great.

Awesome. Well, thanks for all you do, Mark. Thanks for coming in and I know we'll do it again someday down the.

Road, so I look forward to that and thank you. It's really good to do this with you again.

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