Читать книгу The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better in a Fast World - Carl Honore, Carl Honore - Страница 8

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

George Bernard Shaw

On a crisp night in early September, four Typhoon fighter jets roared across the sky above the freezing waters of the North Sea. Locked in a two-on-two dogfight, they swooped, banked and sliced through the darkness at up to 500 miles per hour, searching for a kill-shot. It was a training exercise, but to the pilots it all seemed very real. Strapped into his cockpit, with 24,000 pounds of killing machine throbbing at his fingertips, Wing Commander Dicky Patounas was feeling the adrenaline. It was his first night-time tactical sortie in one of the most powerful fighter jets ever built.

‘We’re in lights off because we’re doing this for real, which we don’t do very often, so it’s pitch black and I’m on goggles and instruments only,’ Patounas recalls. ‘I’m working the radar, putting it in the right mode by shortening the range, changing the elevation, all basic stuff. But the plane was new to me, so I’m maxed out.’ And then something went wrong.

A few months later Patounas relives that night back on the ground. His air base, RAF Coningsby, is in Lincolnshire, an eastern county of England whose flat, featureless terrain is prized more by aviators than by tourists. Dressed in a green flight suit festooned with zippers, Patounas looks like a Top Gun pilot from central casting – square jaw, broad shoulders, ramrod posture and cropped hair. He whips out pen and paper to illustrate what happened next on that September night, speaking in the clipped tones of the British military.

Patounas was flying behind the two ‘enemy’ Typhoons when he decided to execute a manoeuvre known as the overshoot to a Phase 3 Visual Identification (VID). He would pull out to the left and then slingshot back onto his original course, popping up right behind the trailing enemy plane. But something unforeseen happened. Instead of holding their course, the two rival jets up ahead banked left to avoid a helicopter 20 miles away. Both pilots announced the change on the radio but Patounas failed to hear it because he was too distracted executing his manoeuvre. ‘It’s all quite technical,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to do 60 degrees angle of bank through 60 degrees and then roll out for 20 seconds, then put your scanner down by 4 degrees, then change your radar to 10-mile scale, and after 20 seconds you come right using 45 degrees angle of bank, you go through 120 degrees, you roll out and pick up the guy on your radar and he should be at about 4 miles. So I’m working all this out and I miss the radio call stating the new heading.’

When Patounas rolled back out of the manoeuvre, he spotted an enemy Typhoon in front of him just as expected. He was pumped. ‘This aircraft now appears under my cross where I put it for the guy to appear, so I think I’ve done the perfect overshoot,’ he says. ‘I’ve set my radar up, pitched back in and the guy I’m looking for is under my cross in the pitch black. And I go, “I’m a genius, I’m good at this shit.” I was literally thinking I’ve never flown one so perfectly.’

He shakes his head and laughs wryly at his own hubris: it turned out the wrong Typhoon was in his crosshairs. Instead of ending up behind the trailing jet, Patounas was following in the slipstream of the frontrunner – and he had no idea. ‘It was my mistake: I basically lost awareness of two of the aircraft,’ he says. ‘I knew they were there but I didn’t ensure I could see two tracks. What I should have done was bump the range scale up and have a look for the other guy, but I didn’t because I said to myself, “This is perfect.”’

The result was that Patounas passed within 3,000 feet of the rear Typhoon. ‘It wasn’t that close but the key is I had no awareness, because I didn’t even know he was there,’ he says. ‘It could have been three feet, or I could have flown right into him.’ Patouanas falls quiet for a moment, as if picturing the worst-case scenario. On that September night his wingman watched the whole fiasco unfold, knew there was no real danger of a collision and allowed the exercise to continue, but a similar mistake in real combat could have been catastrophic – and Patounas knew it.

The rule of thumb in civil aviation is that a typical air accident is the result of seven human errors. Each mistake on its own may be harmless, even trivial, but string them together and the net effect can be lethal. Flying modern fighter jets, with their fiendishly complex computer systems, is an especially risky business. While enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya in 2011, a US F-15E crashed outside Benghazi after a mechanical failure. A month earlier, two F-16s from the Royal Thai air force fell from the sky during a routine training exercise.

What was surprising about the Typhoon incident over the North Sea was not that it happened but how Patounas reacted: he told everyone about his mistake. In the macho world of the fighter pilot, mea culpas are thin on the ground. As a 22-year veteran of the RAF and commander of a squadron of 18 Typhoon pilots, Patounas had a lot to lose yet still gathered together his entire crew and owned up. ‘I could have come away from this and not said anything, but the right thing to do was to raise it, put it into my report and get it in the system,’ he says. ‘I briefed the whole squadron on how I make mistakes and the mistake I made. That way people know I’m happy to put my hand up and say I messed up too, I’m human.’

This brings us to the first ingredient of the Slow Fix: admitting when we are wrong in order to learn from the error. That means taking the blame for serious blunders as well as the small mistakes and near misses, which are often warning signs of bigger trouble ahead.

Yet highlighting errors is much harder than it sounds. Why? Because there is nothing we like less than owning up to our mistakes. As social animals, we put a high premium on status. We like to fare bella figura, as the Italians say, or look good in front of our peers – and nothing ruins a nice figura more than screwing something up.

That is why passing the buck is an art form in the workplace. My first boss once gave me a piece of advice: ‘Remember that success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.’ Just look at your own CV – how many of your mistakes from previous jobs are listed there? On The Apprentice, most boardroom showdowns involve contestants pinning their own blunders on rivals. Even when big money is at stake, companies often choose to bury their heads in the sand rather than confront errors. Nearly half of financial services firms do not step in to rescue a floundering project until it has missed its deadline or run over budget. Another 15 per cent lack a formal mechanism to deal with a project’s failure.

Nor does it help that society often punishes us for embracing the mea culpa. In a hyper-competitive world, rivals pounce on the smallest error, or the tiniest whiff of doubt, as a sign of weakness. Though Japanese business chiefs and politicians sometimes bow and beg for forgiveness, their counterparts elsewhere bend both language and credibility to avoid squarely owning up to a mistake. In English, the word ‘problem’ has been virtually excised from everyday speech in favour of anodyne euphemisms such as ‘issue’ and ‘challenge’. Hardly a surprise when studies show that executives who conceal bad news from the boss tend to climb the corporate ladder more quickly.

In his retirement, Bill Clinton makes it a rule to say ‘I was wrong’ or ‘I didn’t know that’ at least once a day. If such a moment fails to arise naturally, he goes out of his way to engineer one. He does this to short-circuit the Einstellung effect and all those other biases we encountered earlier. Clinton knows the only way to solve problems in a complex, ever-changing world is to keep an open mind – and the only way to do that is to embrace your own fallibility. But can you imagine him uttering those phrases while he was President of the United States? Not a chance. We expect our leaders to radiate the conviction and certainty that come from having all the answers. Changing direction, or your mind, is never taken as proof of the ability to learn and adapt; it is derided as flip-flopping or wimping out. If President Clinton had confessed to making mistakes, or entertaining doubts about his own policies, his political enemies and the media would have ripped him to pieces.

The threat of litigation is another incentive to shy away from a proper mea culpa. Insurance companies advise clients never to admit blame at the scene of a traffic accident, even if the crash was clearly their fault. Remember how long it took BP to issue anything resembling an official apology for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? Nearly two months. Behind the scenes, lawyers and PR gurus pored over legal precedents to fashion a statement that would appease public opinion without opening the door to an avalanche of lawsuits. Nor is it just companies that shrink from accepting blame. Even after they leave office and no longer need to woo the electorate, politicians find it hard to own up to their errors. Neither Tony Blair nor George W. Bush has properly apologised for invading Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Remove individual ego from the equation, and collectively we still shy away from mea culpas. Britain waited nearly four decades to issue a formal apology for the Bloody Sunday massacre in Northern Ireland in 1972. Australia only apologised in 2008 for the horrors visited upon its aboriginal peoples, followed a year later by the US Senate apologising to African-Americans for the wrongs of slavery.

Even when there are no witnesses to our slip-ups, admitting we are wrong can be wrenching. ‘Nothing is more intolerable,’ Ludwig van Beethoven noted, ‘than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.’ Doing so forces you to confront your frailties and limitations, to rethink who you are and your place in the world. When you mess up, and admit it to yourself, there is nowhere to hide. ‘This is the thing about fully experiencing wrongness,’ wrote Kathryn Schulz in her book Being Wrong. ‘It strips us of all our theories, including our theories about ourselves … it leaves us feeling flayed, laid bare to the bone and the world.’ Sorry really is the hardest word.

This is a shame, because mistakes are a useful part of life. To err is human, as the saying goes. Error can help us solve problems by showing us the world from fresh angles. In Mandarin, the word ‘crisis’ is rendered with two characters, one signifying ‘danger’, the other ‘opportunity’. In other words, every screw-up holds within it the promise of something better – if only we take the time to acknowledge and learn from it. Artists have known this for centuries. ‘Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature,’ observed Salvador Dalí. ‘Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalise them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.’

That same spirit reigns in the more rigorous world of science, where even a failed experiment can yield rich insights and open new paths of inquiry. Many world-changing inventions occurred when someone chose to explore – rather than cover up – an error. In 1928, before leaving to spend August with his family, Sir Alexander Fleming accidentally left a petri dish containing staphylococcus bacteria uncovered in his basement laboratory in London. When he returned a month later he found a fungus had contaminated the sample, killing off all the surrounding bacteria. Rather than toss the dish in the bin, he analysed the patch of mould and found it contained a powerful infection-fighting agent. He named it Penicillium notatum. Two decades later, penicillin, the world’s first and still most widely used antibiotic, hit the market, revolutionising healthcare and earning Fleming a Nobel prize in Medicine. ‘Anyone who has never made a mistake,’ said Einstein, ‘has never tried anything new.’

Military folk have always known that owning up to mistakes is an essential part of learning and solving problems. Errors cost lives in the air force, so flight safety has usually taken precedence over fare bella figura. In the RAF’s long-running monthly magazine, Air Clues, pilots and engineers write columns about mistakes made and lessons learned. Crews are also fêted for solving problems. In a recent issue, a smiling corporal from air traffic control received a Flight Safety Award for overruling a pilot and aborting a flight after noticing a wingtip touch the ground during take-off.

In the RAF, as in most air forces around the world, fighter pilots conduct no-holds-barred debriefings after every sortie to examine what went right and wrong. But that never went far enough. RAF crews tended to share their mistakes only with mates rather than with their superiors or rival squadrons. As one senior officer says: ‘A lot of valuable experience that could have made flying safer for everyone was just seeping away through the cracks.’

To address this, the RAF hired Baines Simmons, a consulting firm with a track record in civil aviation, to devise a system to catch and learn from mistakes, just as the transportation, mining, food and drug safety industries have done.

Group Captain Simon Brailsford currently oversees the new regime. After joining the RAF as an 18-year-old, he went on to fly C130 Hercules transport planes as a navigator in Bosnia, Kosovo, northern Iraq and Afghanistan. Now 46, he combines the spit-and-polish briskness of the officers’ mess with the easy charm of a man who spent three years as the Equerry to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

On the whiteboard in his office he uses a red felt-tip pen to sketch me a picture of a crashed jet, a dead pilot and a plume of smoke. ‘Aviation is a dangerous business,’ he says. ‘What we’re trying to do is stop picking up the deceased and the bits of the broken aeroplane on the ground and pull the whole story back to find out the errors and the near misses that can lead to the crash, so the crash never happens in the first place. We want to solve issues before they become problems.’

Every time crew members at RAF Coningsby catch themselves doing something that could jeopardise safety, they are now urged to submit a report online or fill in one of the special forms pinned up in work stations all over the base. Those reports are then funnelled to a central office, which decides whether to investigate further.

To make the system work, the RAF tries to create what it calls a ‘just culture’. When someone makes a mistake, the automatic response is not blame and punishment; it is to explore what went wrong in order to fix and learn from it. ‘People must feel that if they tell you something, they’re not going to get into trouble, otherwise they won’t tell you when things go wrong, and they might even try to cover them up,’ says Brailsford. ‘That doesn’t mean they won’t get told off or face administrative action or get sent for extra training, but it means they’ll be treated in a just manner befitting what happened to them, taking into account the full context. If you make a genuine mistake and put up your hand, we will say thank you. The key is making sure everyone understands that we’re after people sharing their errors rather than keeping it to themselves so that we’re saving them and their buddies from serious accidents.’

RAF Coningsby rams home that message at every turn. All around the base, in hallways, canteens and even above the urinals, posters urge crew to flag even the tiniest safety concern. Toilet cubicles are stuffed with laminated brochures explaining how to stay safe and why even the smallest mishap is worth reporting. Hammered into the ground beside the main entrance is a poster bearing a photo of the Station Flight Safety Officer pointing his finger in the classic Lord Kitchener pose. Printed above his office telephone number is the question: ‘So what did you think of today?’ The need to admit mistakes is also baked into cadets at military academy. ‘It’s definitely drilled into us from the start that “we prefer you mess up and let us know”,’ says one young engineer at RAF Coningsby. ‘Of course, you get a lot of stick and banter from your mates for making mistakes, but we all understand that owning up is the best way to solve problems now and in the future.’

The RAF ensures that crew see the fruits of their mea culpas. Safety investigators telephone all those who flag up problems within 24 hours, and later tell them how the case was concluded. They also conduct weekly workshops with engineers to explain the outcome of all investigations and why people were dealt with as they were. ‘You can see their eyebrows go up when it’s clear they won’t be punished for making a mistake and they might actually get a pat on the back,’ says one investigator.

Group Captain Stephanie Simpson, a 17-year veteran of the RAF, is in charge of safety in the engineering division at Coningsby. She has quick, watchful eyes and wears her hair scraped back in a tight bun. She tells me the new regime paid off recently when an engineer noticed that carrying out a routine test on a Typhoon had sheared off the end of a dowel in the canopy mechanism. A damaged canopy might not open, meaning a pilot trying to jettison from the cockpit would be mashed against the glass.

The engineer filed a report and Simpson’s team swung into action. Within 24 hours they had figured out that an elementary mistake during the canopy test could damage the dowel. There was no requirement to go back and check afterwards. Flight crews immediately inspected the suspect part across the entire fleet of Typhoons in Europe and Saudi Arabia. The procedure was then changed to ensure that the dowel is no longer damaged during the test.

‘Ten years ago this would probably never have been reported – the engineers would have just thought, “Oh, that’s broken, we’ll just quietly replace it,” and then carried on,’ says Simpson. ‘Now we’re creating a culture where everyone is thinking, “Gosh, there could be other aircraft on this station with the same problem that might not be spotted in future so I’d better tell someone right now.” That way you stop a small problem becoming a big one.’

Thanks to Patounas’s candour, an RAF investigation discovered that a series of errors led to the near miss above the North Sea. His own failure to hear the order to bank left was the first. The second was that the other pilots changed course even though he did not acknowledge the fresh heading. Then, after Patounas overshot, the whole team failed to switch on their lights. ‘It turned out a whole set of factors were not followed and if anyone had done one of the things they should have, it wouldn’t have happened,’ says Patounas. ‘The upside is this reminds everyone of the rules for doing a Phase 3 VID at night. So next time we won’t have the same issue.’

Others in his squadron are already following his lead. Days before my visit, a young corporal pointed out that certain procedures were not being properly followed. ‘What she said was not a particularly good read, but that’s going in her report as a positive because she had the courage of her convictions to go against the grain when she could have been punished,’ says Patounas. ‘Twenty years ago, she wouldn’t have raised the question or if she had she’d have been told, “Don’t you say how rubbish my squadron is! I want my dirty laundry kept to me,” whereas I’m saying thank you.’

The RAF is not a paragon of problem-solving. Not every mistake or near miss is reported. Similar cases are not always dealt with in the same manner, which can undermine talk of a ‘just culture’. Some officers remain sceptical about persuading pilots and engineers to accept the virtues of airing all their dirty laundry. Many of the mea culpa columns in Air Clues magazine are still published anonymously. ‘Sorry’ remains a hard word to say in the RAF.

Yet the change is paying off. In the first three years of the new regime, 210 near misses or errors were reported at RAF Coningsby. Of these, 73 triggered an investigation. In each one, steps were taken to make sure the mistake never happened again. ‘Given that we never reported near misses before, that’s a quantum shift, a big leap of faith in people,’ says Brailsford. ‘Instead of putting a plaster over problems, we’re now going deeper and dealing with them at their root. We’re nipping problems in the bud by stopping them before they even happen.’ Other air forces, from Israel to Australia, have taken notice.

Adding the mea culpa to your problem-solving toolbox pays off beyond the military. Take ExxonMobil. After the epic Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989, the company set out to catch and investigate every screw-up, however small. It walked away from a large drilling project in the Gulf of Mexico because, unlike BP, it decided drilling there was too risky. Safety is now such a part of the corporate DNA that every buffet laid out for company events comes with signs warning not to consume the food after two hours. In its cafeterias, kitchen staff monitor the temperature of their salad dressings.

Every time an error occurs at an ExxonMobil facility, the first instinct of the company is to learn from it, rather than punish those involved. Staff talk about the ‘gift’ of the near miss. Glenn Murray, an employee for nearly three decades, was part of the Valdez clean-up. Today, as head of safety at the company, he believes no blunder is too small to ignore. ‘Every near miss,’ he says, ‘has something to teach us if we just take the time to investigate it.’

Like the RAF and Toyota, ExxonMobil encourages even the most junior employee to speak up when something goes wrong. Not long ago a young engineer new to the company was uneasy about a drilling project in West Africa – so he temporarily closed it down. ‘He shut down a multi-million dollar project because he felt there were potential problems and we needed to pause and think it all through, and management backed him,’ says Murray. ‘We even had him stand up at an event and named him Employee of the Quarter.’ By every yardstick, Exxon now has an enviable safety record in the oil industry.

Mistakes can also be a gift when dealing with consumers. Four out of every five products launched perish within the first year, and the best companies learn from their flops. The Newton MessagePad, the Pippin and the Macintosh Portable all bombed for Apple yet helped pave the way for winners like the iPad.

Even in the cut-throat world of brand management, where the slightest misstep can send customers stampeding for the exit and hobble the mightiest firm, owning up to mistakes can deliver a competitive edge. In 2009, with sales tanking in the United States, Domino’s Pizza invited customers to deliver their verdict on its food. The feedback was stinging. ‘Worst excuse for a pizza I’ve ever tasted,’ said one member of the public. ‘Totally devoid of flavour,’ said another. Many customers compared the company’s pizza crust to cardboard.

Rather than sulk, or sit on the results, Domino’s issued a full-blown mea culpa. In documentary-style television commercials, Patrick Doyle, the company’s CEO, admitted the chain had lost its way in the kitchen and promised to deliver better pizzas in the future. Domino’s then went back to the drawing board, giving its pies a complete makeover with new dough, sauce and cheese.

Its Pizza Turnaround campaign worked a treat. Year-on-year sales surged 14.3 per cent, the biggest jump in the history of the fast-food industry. Two years after the apology the company’s stock price was up 233 per cent. Of course, the new pizza recipes helped, but the starting-point was Domino’s doing what RAF air crews and Exxon employees are now expected to do as a matter of course: acknowledging the error of its ways. This allowed the firm to learn exactly where it was going wrong so it could fix it. It also cleared the air. These days, so many companies trumpet ‘new and improved’ products that the net effect is a whirlwind of white noise that leaves consumers cold. The very act of owning up to its mistakes allowed Domino’s to cut through the din and reboot its relationship with customers.

PR experts agree that the best way for a company to handle a mistake is to apologise and explain what it will do to put things right. This accords with my own experience. The other day a payment into my bank account went astray. After 20 minutes of evasion from the call centre, my voice began to rise as my blood reached boiling point. And then a manager came on the line and said: ‘Mr Honoré, I’m very sorry. We made a mistake with this payment.’ As she explained how the money would be retrieved, my fury drained away and we ended up bantering about the weather and our summer holidays.

Public apologies can have a similarly soothing effect. When a customer filmed a FedEx driver tossing a package containing a computer monitor over a six-foot fence in the run-up to Christmas 2011, the video went viral and threatened to annihilate sales during the busiest time of year. Rather than stonewall, though, the company apologised right away. In a blog post entitled ‘Absolutely, Positively Unacceptable’, FedEx’s senior vice-president for US operations announced he was ‘upset, embarrassed, and very sorry’ for the episode. The company also gave the customer a new monitor and disciplined the driver. As a result, FedEx weathered the storm.

Even when we squander other people’s money, owning up in order to learn from the error is often the best policy. In 2011, Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Canada set up a website called AdmittingFailure.com, where aid workers can post their mistakes as cautionary tales. ‘Opening up like that is completely the opposite of the norm in the sector, so it was a huge risk,’ says Ashley Good, Venture Leader at EWB. But it paid off. No longer afraid of being pilloried for messing up, EWB staff became more willing to take the sort of risks that are often the stepping stone to creative breakthroughs. ‘People now feel they have the freedom to experiment, push themselves, take chances because they know they won’t be blamed if they don’t get it right on the first try,’ says Good. ‘And when you push boundaries like that, you get more creative solutions to problems.’ One example: after much trial and error, EWB has devised a system that improves water and sanitation services in Malawi by mobilising district governments, the private sector and communities all at the same time. Workers from across the development sector now post their own stories on AdmittingFailure.com. EWB’s donors love the new regime, too. Instead of dashing for the exit, they welcomed the eagerness to learn from mistakes. Says Good: ‘We’ve found that being open and honest actually builds a stronger bond and higher trust with our donors.’

The same holds true in personal relationships. A first step towards rebuilding bridges after falling out with a partner, friend, parent or child is for all parties to take their share of the blame. Admitting mistakes can ease the guilt and shame gnawing at the wrongdoer and help the victim overcome the anger that often stands in the way of forgiveness. Marianne Bertrand sees the magic of the mea culpa every week in her job as a family therapist in Paris. ‘Many people sit in my office and cannot even begin to address their problems because they are stuck in the rage and resentment for what went wrong,’ she says. ‘But when they finally accept and apologise sincerely for their mistakes, and hear the other person doing the same, you can really feel the atmosphere in the room change, the tension subside, and then we can start working on reconciliation.’

Even doctors are warming to the mea culpa. Study after study shows that what many patients want after being the victim of a medical mistake is not a lump sum payment or the physician’s head on a plate. What they really crave is what FedEx delivered in the wake of that package-tossing incident: a sincere apology, a full explanation of how the error occurred and a clear plan to ensure the same thing will not happen again. Among patients who file a suit for medical malpractice in the United States, nearly 40 per cent say they might not have done so had the attending physician explained and apologised for the mishap. The trouble is, many in the medical profession are too proud or too scared to say sorry.

Those that do so reap the benefits. In the late 1980s the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky became the first hospital in the United States to tap the power of the mea culpa. It informs patients and their families when any member of staff makes a mistake that causes harm, even if the victims are unaware of the error. If the attending physician is found to be at fault, he or she must deliver a clear, compassionate apology to the patient. The hospital also explains the steps it will take to ensure that the error does not happen again, and may offer some form of restitution. But the cornerstone of the new regime is the simple act of saying sorry. This scores well with patients and their families. ‘We believe we spend much less time and money on malpractice lawsuits these days as a result,’ says Joseph Pellecchia, the hospital’s Chief of Staff.

Apologising also helps deliver better healthcare. When medical workers can deal openly with the emotional fallout that comes from making a mistake, they are less stressed and more able to learn from their errors. ‘Physicians are not gods, they are human beings, and that means they make mistakes,’ says Pellecchia. ‘There’s been an incredible change here where we’ve gone from a punitive environment to a learning environment where a physician can ask, “What happened here?” “What went wrong?” “Was it a systems problem?” “Was it me?” – and learn from their mistakes to deliver better care.’ Other hospitals around the world have followed suit. In the same vein, state and provincial governments across the US and Canada have enacted what are known as ‘sorry laws’, which bar litigants from using a physician’s apology as proof of guilt. Everywhere the net effect is the same: happier doctors, happier patients and less litigation.

The truth is that any Slow Fix worthy of the name usually starts with a mea culpa. Whether at work or in relationships, most of us tend to drift along pretending that all is well – remember the status-quo bias and the legacy problem. Admitting there is a problem, and accepting our share of the blame, can jolt us out of that rut. In the Twelve-Step Programme invented by Alcoholic Anonymous and now used in the battle against many other addictions, Step 1 is to admit you have lost control of your own behaviour. ‘Hello, my name is Carl, and I am addicted to the quick fix.’

To overcome our natural aversion to admitting mistakes, especially in the workplace, removing the stick of punishment is often just the first step. It also helps to dangle a carrot to encourage or even reward us for owning up. Remember the Employee of the Quarter accolade bestowed on that young engineer at ExxonMobil. As well as Flight Safety Awards, the RAF pays a cash bonus to anyone who highlights an error that later saves the Air Force money. In the aid world, organisations can win Brilliant Failure Awards for sharing mistakes made in development projects. At SurePayroll, an online payroll company, staff nominate themselves for a Best New Mistakes competition. At a light-hearted annual meeting, they listen to tales of colleagues messing up and what everyone can learn from their blunders. Those who own up to the most useful mistakes win a cash prize.

Even in education, where botching a single question on an exam paper can torpedo your chances of attending a top-tier university, moves are afoot to reward students for embracing mistakes. Worried that its high-achieving pupils had lost their appetite for taking intellectual risks, a top London girls’ school held a Failure Week in 2012. With the help of teachers and parents, and through assemblies, tutorials and other activities, students at Wimbledon High explored the benefits of being wrong. ‘Successful people learn from failure, pick themselves up and move on,’ says Heather Hanbury, the headmistress. ‘Something going wrong may even have been the best thing that could have happened to them in the long run – in sparking creativity, for instance – even if it felt like a disaster at the time.’ Failure Week has altered the atmosphere in the school. Instead of mollycoddling pupils, teachers feel more comfortable telling them point-blank when they have given a wrong answer, thus making it easier to search for a better one. The girls are taking greater risks, too, pursuing more daring lines of inquiry in the classroom and entering creative writing competitions in larger numbers. Members of the school debating club are deploying more adventurous arguments and winning more competitions. ‘Maybe the most important thing the Week gave us is a language to talk about failure as something not to avoid but as an essential part of learning, improving and solving problems,’ says Hanbury. ‘If one girl is upset by a poor mark, another might now make a friendly joke about it or say something like, “OK, you failed, but what can you learn from it?”’

Most workplaces are in dire need of a similar cultural shift. Think of all the lessons that go unlearned, all the problems left to fester, all the bad feelings churned up, all the time, energy and money wasted, thanks to the human instinct to cover up mistakes. Now think of how much more efficient – not to mention agreeable – your workplace would be if every error could be a spur to working smarter. Instead of muddling along, you could revolutionise your office or factory from the bottom up.

There are steps we can all take to harness the mea culpa and learn from our mistakes. Schedule a daily Clinton moment when you say, ‘I was wrong’ – and then find out why. When you mess up at work, pinpoint one or two lessons to be gleaned from the mishap and then quickly own up. When others mess up, quell the temptation to scoff or gloat and instead help them to spot the silver lining. Start a conversation in your company, school or family about how admitting mistakes can inspire creative leaps. Reinforce that message by using feel-good terms such as ‘gift’ or ‘bonus’ to describe the uncovering of helpful errors and by pinning up quotes such as this from Henry T. Ford: ‘Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.’

It also helps to create a shared space, such as a web forum or a suggestions book, for airing mistakes. Borrowing an idea from Toyota, Patounas has put up a Communications Board in his squadron headquarters where any crew member can call attention to a problem – and every case is promptly investigated and addressed. ‘It’s very popular already and you see the engineers and pilots gathered round it,’ says Patounas. ‘It’s tangible and something you can put your arms round.’

It certainly helps to know that our errors seldom look as bad to others as we imagine. We have a natural tendency to overestimate how much people notice or care about our gaffes. Psychologists call this the ‘spotlight effect’. You may feel mortified to discover you attended a big meeting with laddered tights or egg on your tie, but the chances are hardly anyone else noticed. In one study at Cornell University, students were asked to walk into a room wearing a Barry Manilow T-shirt, a social kiss of death for any self-respecting hipster. While the subjects nearly died of embarrassment, only 23 per cent of the people in the room even clocked the cheesy crooner.

If owning up to a mistake is seldom as bad as we fear, however, it is only the first step towards a Slow Fix. The next is taking the time to work out exactly how and why we erred in the first place.