Failure is no Option

A safety culture in which the learning potential of error is widely recognized cannot be lived if managers fail to lead themselves. The personal reaction to errors that become known is the key to success. But how can this be achieved if you yourself are under stress?

Have you noticed that you react differently to mistakes made by others? It is about mistakes whose consequences you feel. There are countless exogenous factors that influence our reaction. It's good to know that there are also influences that we can proactively manage.

It is in line with the management zeitgeist to see mistakes as learning opportunities. Why is it, one wonders, that so many people find it so difficult to put this noble approach into practice? There are two aspects to this that deserve special attention. In this blog, I address two main suspects.

Everyone is talking about dealing constructively with mistakes. Learning from mistakes is the order of the day. In order to succeed, we have to find a different way of dealing with it. This starts with ourselves.

In the aftermath of the unfortunate emergency number outage in Switzerland, a journalist calls on Swisscom's CEO to resign. The reporter is guided by the time-honored error-blame paradigm. This should give us pause for thought. Not because we want to absolve executives of their responsibility. But because antiquated tools are being used here to try…