I recently watched a TED talk where a physician, Dr. Goldman, had a very frank talk about failure and how it is perceived in healthcare. He starts off with a comparison of success rates between physicians and baseball players. If a baseball player has a batting average of .300 he is an incredible hitter. Our beloved Big Papi had a batting average of .263 this year and is considered a decent player. This meant that he hit the ball about 26% of the time. What if we were to rate other professions the same way? There are some professions that we expect to have near perfect performance. Is project management one of those professions?
Dr. Goldman goes on to describe his early years as a provider and some of his first mistakes he made as a resident. The stakes are undoubtedly higher in his profession than mine, but what I found very interesting is the perception of mistakes and the lack of support among his colleagues. Maybe it is a factor of the profession, because who would really pick a doctor that has a .263 average on appendix surgery? But still how and where does a doctor learn from mistakes if the culture doesn’t support conversation around them?
I’ve written blog posts before about how it’s important to learn from our mistakes. I believe that project managers, in general, are more open to admitting and learning from mistakes and project failures. A whole process in our methodology forces us to face them! The lessons learned process helps us as project managers, as well as project teams, to focus on both the mistake sand the successes of the project, and to carry only the good stuff forward to the next and learn from and change the things that didn’t work.
If I look at the projects I managed within the last year, I’m batting a .750, which is better than Papi did this year, but it also includes some failure. One particular aspect I like about my profession and my current group at DFCI is that even when faced with a failed project, the group is willing to discuss and support me through that process. How are you supported when faced with failure? Listen to this talk and comment on how your experiences differ.
https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_goldman_doctors_make_mistakes_can_we_talk_about_that
I truly believe that learning from failures is a must for any high performing organization. Dana-Farber is a living example of a hospital that reinvented itself after a patient death caused by an accidental overdose. I was not here at that time, but heard that the soul-searching and deep analysis of what went wrong made us better as an institution. May that attitude bring us into the future honoring our patients, and in particular the patient who lost her life.