The Culture Change We Need

Our world today is more competitive than ever. If you want to make it to the top you are expected to perform at a near-infallible level of performance. However this culture we have built to have no remorse for failure and where we identify mistakes and injustices brutally when they occur, putting them in the spotlight of humiliation has in fact had an affect opposite to that of which desired, instead it has stunted our ability to learn and improve as failure is not accepted and therefore not taken responsibility for which prevents us from learning from them, and condemns us to making the same mistake again in the future.

To see the power of nurturing an ideal growth culture we have to look no further than the aviation industry, in 1960 Boeing reported approximately 42 accidents per million flights, today it is about 1. This drastic improvement is down to the nature of the attitude in the airplane business. Failures are obvious here and there is no room for them, simply put, if they have accidents no one will fly and their industry will die, so they have no option but to improve. They do this by having a fully transparent and objective-based system where pilots are encouraged to share their mistakes or close calls so everyone can learn from them and where mistakes are investigated, the cause is found and address, and every pilot is made aware of the reforms to improve so as to prevent it happening again in the future.

On the flip side criminal justice is a prime example of an industry which believes in its near perfection but however is fundamentally flawed. One reason for this is that judges have trained for years and have devoted their lives to learning the law inside out, learning hundreds of case studies of by heart and having to pass an uncountable amount of exams to get where they are. It is only natural to think that after this process you are fully fit and equipped with the knowledge to make the correct judgement on near enough every case. Therefore when their beliefs on a case are challenged by factual evidence a lot of the time they are too clouded by their own perception of infallibility they deny the evidence, and instead of acknowledging their failure on the case and changing their original decision they twist the data to enforce their original judgement. This denial of failure by judges causes a closed-loop learning culture in the law system where there are minimal investigations and cases where responsibility is taken and failure is accepted, which is holding the criminal justice back from improving. How can we learn from our mistakes and improve if we are too wrapped up in our own self ego to even admit failure in the first place?

In our society we automatically jump to conclusions when bad things happen and instantly look to scapegoat all that are immediately involved to take out our anger at the failure this is especially evident in the media. This is however the worst thing we can do in response to failure, it creates a blame culture where on an individual level people suffer blame on top of their already self-inflicted guilt which can have devastating psychological effects and on a large scale of the system as a whole people become afraid of failure due to its consequences leading to them not reporting them or take responsibility, adapting their interpretation of the truth to enforce their beliefs (as in the criminal justice system) which clouds the truth and stops us taking responsibility and being able to analyse mistakes and learn from them, condemning ourselves to make them again in the future.

Even as we cannot have an instant-blame system we also cannot have an anything goes system. We must find the perfect point between the two where we can comfortably take ownership of mistakes while people also know there will be consequences for negligence. This is done by not jumping to conclusions and blaming the most obvious people involved when something goes wrong but by conductingfull investigations into the reason for the failure and addressing it appropriately, whether it is a systematic error, from which we can learn and make improvements to our system to ensure it doesn t happen again or the carelessness of the individual which should justly have some form of punishment.

We need to have a culture where we are able and encouraged to take responsibility and speak out about our mistakes and the lessons we have learnt from them so others don t make the same mistake in the future, this will drive incremental change and drastically lead to a system that nears perfection is all aspects.

A change is needed in our society to redefine failure, it is not something that makes you unfit to work at the highest level but is an opportunity to observe the flaws in the current system in which we work, how they happen, and how we can prevent them from happening again in the future to achieve a successful system, as ultimately the paradox of success is that success is built upon a mountain of failures, thus the greater the number of failures we learn from the closer our system comes to becoming truly infallible rather than the phony image we have of perfection we delude ourselves with at the moment.