The Mistake Inside The Failure

My son called recently, upset about a collaborative engineering project that had not gone well. He felt he had done everything right, but something else, unanticipated, had caused it to fall apart.

We ended up in a bit of an argument. And that argument is what made me want to write this.

There is a difference between a failure and a mistake.

A failure can happen even when you did everything right. Good judgment, honest effort, and it still did not work out. Sometimes things simply do not work out. And it is genuinely okay to fail.

But in most failures, if you look honestly, there is also a mistake somewhere. And a mistake is simpler and more personal than we like to admit. It is your contribution to the failure. Something you did. Something you did not do. Or something you could have done and did not even think of.

Maybe you assumed everyone understood the plan and never set the context. Maybe you overlooked an early risk and said nothing. Maybe you did not follow up, or ask the obvious question, or prepare the way you should have.

None of these may explain the whole failure. But they are your part in it. And your part is the most important part you can actually learn from.

This gets much harder the moment other people are involved.

In solo work, you own the outcome, because there is no one else in the frame. But most work is collaborative. Cross-functional projects, group efforts, shared goals. And the moment there are others in the picture, there is always somewhere else to point. The other team. The other function. The person who dropped the ball. Collaboration gives us a whole cast of people to hold responsible, so we look everywhere except at ourselves.

That is the easy road, and almost all of us take it.

I see it everywhere. I have watched the most senior, most capable people in a room all agree that something went wrong, while every single one of them quietly believes they had no part in it.

If you look honestly and find there truly was no mistake on your side, wonderful. Accept the failure and move on with a clear conscience.

But that is rare. Usually there is something. And the only question that matters is whether you are willing to find it.

Because the lesson that improves you is never the one out there.

It is usually the one you are unwilling to look at within yourself.