You made a huge mistake. Thank you!

A five-minute read on how mistakes shape our learning and why we should embrace them.

Percy Spencer was an American physicist born in Maine in 1894. Percy’s father died when he was less than two years old, and his mother left him in the care of his aunt and uncle. When Percy was just seven years old, his uncle died, which prompted him to leave school and start working to provide sustenance for himself and his aunt. For several years he worked from sunrise to sunset in a spool mill.

When he became aware of the advent of electricity usage, he taught himself the most he could and applied to perform the installation of electricity in a nearby mill. After the sinking of the Titanic, he developed an interest in wireless communication, which led to him joining the U.S. Navy where he became an expert in radio technology through self-teaching.

Throughout his life, Percy taught himself trigonometry, calculus, chemistry, physics, metallurgy and several other subjects.

By 1939 Spencer was one of the world’s leading experts in radar and worked for the U.S. Department of Defense at Raytheon.

It was at Raytheon that, in 1945, he was tasked with building magnetrons. While standing in front of an active radar set, Spencer noticed that a candy bar that he had in his pocket had melted. The phenomenon had been recorded before. The main difference was that Percy was the first one to have the initiative to further investigate it. One can only speculate what made Percy pursue the investigation of the phenomenon that others ignored, but the story of his life up until that day shows resilience, initiative, humbleness and his strong will to experiment and learn.

After several other experiments with different types of food, on October 8 of 1945, Raytheon filed a patent application for Percy’s microwave oven.

Percy’s story is just one of many about great discoveries being born from mistakes.

We all make mistakes (“to err is human”) in our day-to-day lives, so what makes Percy Spencer’s mistake so special?

Special Mistakes

First of all, to be fair, chance. There are lucky mistakes and not so lucky mistakes. Percy discovered the microwave oven by chance and that was a lucky mistake. He could have developed cataracts or cancer, which would have been an unlucky mistake.

But the thing that probably made Spencer different was the ability to own his mistakes and run with them. That ability can be seen as a result of his own personality traits and of the environment that surrounded him, both in the instant of his discovery and during his upbringing. There are environments that are conducive of initiative and others that stifle said initiative.

Building on what has been said up until this point in this text, a breakthrough happens by a combination of chance, personal traits and environment. Chance, we cannot really control; we can keep trying and increase our chances, but that is it. We control personal traits by placing the right people in the right places. And finally, the environment is all about creating the right place.

Balancing Fear

Jumping from an aeroplane with a parachute requires courage; jumping from an aeroplane without a parachute requires stupidity.

Fear has a negative connotation, but as with pretty much everything else, it is dangerous to look at fear from a black and white perspective. Fear is probably the most important survival mechanism the human race has, and survival is the ultimate motivator.

It is a fair assumption that if we did not have fear, we would be in a vastly less evolved civilizational state. Why would we keep making advancements in the field of medicine if we did not fear disease or death itself? Why would we keep improving the safety of cars or air travel?

Now we are back in the black and white perspective. Not everything about fear is great. Fear is a great motivator, but it is also a great inhibitor. Fear stops us from taking risks.

We could say fear manifests itself as the search for safety.

Risk needs to be calculated, balancing the consequences of success with the consequences of failure. To improve the chance of success, we need to decrease the consequences of failure so that people feel safe in taking the risk, in making mistakes.

So, if someone in your team or in your company tells you they want to jump from an aeroplane, don’t tell them not to do it - just hand them a parachute.

Making mistakes at Feedzai

One of the first things that I heard when I joined Feedzai was “move fast, fail fast, learn fast”. It was the first time in my professional life that I witnessed the acceptance of failure on an institutional level and, on top of that, the recognition that failure is one of the steps in learning.

We tend to sweep failure under the rug because, as human beings, it’s easier than facing backlash and judgement for our mistakes. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes; it is, as we have said before, human to err. There is something wrong with not learning from mistakes, and the first step to that path is not owning our mistakes.

So how do we make people own their mistakes? Easy. We just need to remove judgement and backlash.

At the Feedzai Cloud Operations team, mistakes, problems and unforeseen issues form the backbone of our learning process. We accept that we are going to make mistakes, embrace those mistakes and make them part of the process.

For each incident that occurs in one of our environments, we create a post-mortem and perform a root cause analysis. We do this not because we need to find a culprit or shift the blame but because we need to learn.

Most of the change comes from that acceptance of failure. We change how we do things based on the failures from the past, so it is paramount that everyone in the team feels safe in owning mistakes.

The importance of a safe environment

No one dictates a company’s culture and environment. Management can provide rules and orientation, but in the end, each one of us contributes to building the culture and environment.

How do we contribute to an environment where it is safe to make mistakes?

We start by owning our own mistakes. We show each other that everyone makes mistakes and is fallible.

We stop judging others’ mistakes. We acknowledge that failing is one step in learning and that each time we do something, we do it a bit better.

We show that we want and need to learn from each other’s mistakes. If someone makes a mistake, that will probably help me to not make that mistake in the future.

And sometimes, a mistake might result in something brilliant. It is just a matter of chance.

We need to keep failing so that we can succeed.

To everyone that has made a mistake at Feedzai, thank you!