The best teams make more mistakes than the worst ones.
Not fewer. More.
Amy Edmondson, a Harvard professor, found this studying hospital teams. The best ones, the teams with the best patient outcomes, looked like they were making far more mistakes than everyone else. They weren't. They were the only ones owning up to them. The rest were making just as many and burying the lot, so they learned from none of them.
She called it psychological safety. Horrible phrase. I call it a speak-up culture. Can your people tell you the truth without flinching, or have they decided it's safer to say nothing?
Why this is on my mind
There's a national inquiry into NHS maternity care in the news this week. Underneath the headlines is the same thing at the worst scale imaginable. More than 700 recommendations in a decade. Most never acted on. The same failures written up again and again, never absorbed. I'm not going to pull that apart here. Real families are living it and it deserves better than a management metaphor from me. But the machine underneath is the same one running in your Tuesday meeting. Bad news that doesn't travel. Lessons that never land.
Data, or shame?
Matthew Syed wrote the best book going on this, Black Box Thinking. His comparison is aviation against healthcare. Flying is the safest way to travel on earth, and it got there through one choice. They treat every failure as data. Recover the black box, investigate it, share the findings across the whole industry, no blame attached. Healthcare did the opposite for years. Bury the error, repeat the error.
Same stakes, but opposite cultures. The whole difference is one question. When something goes wrong here, is it data, or is it shame?
Most businesses, if we're honest, are more like healthcare. You lose a customer, make some excuses, move on.
The step everyone skips
Plenty of managers hear this and think it's about being nicer. Don't shout, don't punish. That's half of it. But you can have a team that cheerfully tells you what went wrong and still learn nothing, because nobody does anything with it. A black box is no use on the seabed. Somebody has to open it.
There's a simple loop for that. Prepare, execute, review, repeat.
Spot the bit your team skips. You prepare. You execute. Then you jump straight to the next thing, and the review never happens. The project ends, everyone says "great, what's next," and the most valuable thing it produced goes in the bin. You ship the work and bin the lesson.
So build it in, and keep it tiny or it dies. After anything that matters, fifteen minutes, three questions. What happened? Facts first, before the excuses. What did we learn? What do we do differently? That's the system. The forty-five-minute version with a deck gets done twice and dies. The fifteen-minute version becomes furniture.
Review the wins too
A win you don't review is a win you can't repeat, because you don't know which bit caused it. And sometimes you won and you got lucky, and you've no idea which. Skip the review and you bank the luck as skill, then walk straight into it next time.
There's a softer reason as well. If the only time you gather the team is after something's gone wrong, they'll dread it. Review the wins and the whole thing stops feeling like a trial.
You go first
Your mistake goes on the table before anyone else's. "That was my call. I briefed it too late and too vaguely, and you lot paid for it in the final week." You owning it first is what makes everyone else's sayable. Open with "so, what went wrong then?" and you'll get silence and a chat about the weather.
And don't panic when it gets a bit spiky. People pushing back on each other in the room is the habit working, not failing. The review to worry about is the polite one that says nothing true.
Buying the black box is easy. The NHS bought theirs and it's still shut. Opening it every week is the job.
Pick something you're working on now, and tell people we'll review it afterwards. If you decide to do it after a recent failure, that sets the tone for all of them, so ideally the first one is a win. Fifteen minutes. Three questions. You answer the last one first.
Have a great week,
Arran
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Arran Russell
Founder, Set The Tone
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Ps. If you're not sure your team would actually tell you when something's gone wrong, I built a quick Speak-Up Test. Five sentences they should be able to say to you without hesitating, scored out of 25. Few minutes, free. Take the Speak-Up Test.
