The Degree Of Error Matters

This is a valuable message that Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the illustrious erstwhile captain of the India Cricket team, highlights in one of the interviews.

How do you intervene when someone in the team is not playing according to the plan? He was asked.

To which his response was, 

In cricket, it can never be about your plan alone. It’s also about how the other side is playing, and there will be days when your best-laid plans will not work. As a captain, I can’t be analyzing every mistake. Mistakes happen, and players learn and adapt. 

However, I do intervene if the degree of error is very high. If the plan is to bowl a Yorker, and the bowler delivers a juicy full-length bowl, that’s acceptable. But if the bowler bowls short of good length, it’s a problem. The degree of error is too high for it to be a normal occurrence. There is a problem of execution, not being aligned to the plan.

It’s the same in our work lives. Things do not always go as planned. When they don’t, one must see the degree of variance.

• Being 5 minutes late for a meeting is okay – being 30 minutes late is not.
•  Not closing the deal in a timely fashion is not the problem; not being able even to initiate a conversation or elicit interest in your solution is a problem( possibly of skill or execution)
•  Forgetting to put a signal when taking a turn may be fine, but speeding through an orange or red light is a problem.

Everyone means well, and mistakes happen sometimes, knowingly or unknowingly. That said, for mistakes we make, knowing what the right thing to do is, ideally, we must not be too far off the mark. The degree of error matters.