Companies that fear mistakes stop innovating. From penicillin to Post-its, breakthrough innovations emerged from errors. Shifting from blame culture to learning culture enables psychological safety, faster adaptation, and real growth. In complex business environments, mistakes aren’t failures—they’re strategic data for continuous improvement and competitive advantage.
We live in a performance-obsessed society. From our earliest years at school, we have been conditioned to fear the red pen. In our collective imagination, mistakes are stains; signs of incompetence that must be hidden before anyone notices. However, shifting our focus from the school desk to the complex dynamics of business organisations reveals a counterintuitive truth: a company that never makes mistakes has stopped evolving. Or worse, it is a company that is lying to itself.
From a sociological perspective, mistakes are not just setbacks, but feedback. They are pure data, a signal from the system telling us that the map we are using no longer corresponds to the territory. Yet most corporate structures are still designed according to rigid hierarchical models, in which mistakes immediately trigger a search for the culprit rather than a solution.
The Serendipity of Mistakes: When Mistakes Become Revolution
To understand the intrinsic value of error, just look at the history of innovation. Some of the most iconic products of our time did not emerge from perfect five-year plans or flawless execution, but from colossal mistakes, oversights and technical failures that, in a rigid environment, would have been discarded along with the career of the person responsible.
Take penicillin, for example. In 1928, Alexander Fleming wasn’t trying to revolutionise medicine; he was simply trying to tidy his laboratory (and failing). He left a plate of bacterial culture near an open window before going on holiday. When he returned, he found that mould had contaminated the sample, killing the bacteria. An ‘old-school’ boss would have reprimanded him for being sloppy and contaminating the experiment. However, Fleming was curious enough to ask, ‘What happened here?’ This procedural error ended up saving millions of lives.
Now let’s move to the offices of 3M in the 1970s. Chemist Spencer Silver was trying to create an extremely strong glue for the aerospace industry. The result was a total failure. Instead, he created a weak, pressure-sensitive adhesive that stuck slightly but came off easily without leaving a residue. Useless, right? For years, this “wrong glue” remained a waste product until Art Fry, a colleague of Silver’s who was frustrated by bookmarks falling out of his church hymnal, had an idea. Thus, the Post-it note was born. Silver’s mistake became one of the world’s most ubiquitous stationery items.
Perhaps the most striking case of a ‘side effect’ becoming a core business is that of Viagra. In the 1990s, Pfizer was testing sildenafil citrate to treat angina and hypertension. The cardiological results were disappointing. The project was technically a failure. However, during the testing phase, researchers noticed a very specific and unexpected “side effect” in male subjects. Rather than hiding this embarrassing data or considering it a distraction from cardiological research, the company was flexible enough to change direction. The rest is pharmaceutical and social history.
“Oops! I dropped the lemon tart” is a famous dessert that was born from an accident: a sous-chef at the multi-starred restaurant Osteria Francescana dropped a tart, which broke, creating a composition that chef Massimo Bottura saw as “perfect” and decided to serve as a dessert. The deconstructed version includes elements such as lemon eggnog, lemongrass cream, a broken tart shell, and ingredients such as candied ginger and capers, arranged in a chaotic yet considered manner.
What do these stories have in common? Not luck, but a culture of observation. In all these cases, the error was analysed, not hidden. The anomaly was treated as valuable information.
The sociology of ‘blame culture’ versus ‘just culture’
If error is so valuable, why are we so afraid of it in our companies? The answer lies in the dominant organisational culture, often referred to as ‘blame culture’.
In a blame culture, mistakes are personalised. When something goes wrong, the automatic question is, ‘Who did it?’
This approach has devastating sociological effects on the work group. It creates a climate of fear and mistrust. If I know that a mistake will lead to public humiliation, a demerit or dismissal, I will do everything I can to hide it. A hidden mistake is a time bomb: not only do we not learn from it, but it often grows until it becomes systemic and irreparable. In this scenario, innovation dies because innovation requires risk, and risk involves the possibility of making mistakes. No one takes risks if they know they will be punished.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, we find what is called a ‘Just Culture’ or ‘Learning Culture’ in organisational sociology (and in the aviation industry, which has mastered it).
In this ecosystem, the question when faced with failure changes radically. Rather than asking “Who did it?”, the focus is on “What happened?” and “Why did the system allow it to happen?”.
The basic assumption is that people generally do not come to work intending to sabotage the company. If an employee makes a mistake, it is often because processes were ambiguous, training was lacking or they were tired. Shifting the focus from the individual to the process enables what is known as ‘psychological safety’ (a concept popularised by Amy Edmondson’s studies at Harvard).
Psychological safety is the social glue of a high-performing team. It is the knowledge that if I admit to making a mistake, my colleagues will support me in solving the problem and preventing it from happening again, rather than criticising me.
The Paradox of Perfection
We live in a complex era, often defined by the acronym VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). In such a changing world, the idea of being able to plan everything perfectly without ever making a mistake is a dangerous illusion. The companies that survive are not the perfect ones, but the resilient and antifragile ones (to quote Nassim Taleb): those that improve precisely because of stress and mistakes.
The Agile methodology and the Silicon Valley mantra ‘Fail fast, fail often’ stem from this very need. This is not an invitation to masochism or negligence. It is an invitation to learn quickly. If you have to make mistakes (and you will), do so when the project is small and the cost is low, and learn the lesson immediately.
In this sense, mistakes become a corporate asset. A mistake made and analysed is knowledge gained. A hidden mistake is a debt that accrues interest.
Towards a New Ecology of Work
It is time to rewrite the social contract within our companies. We must stop viewing the organisational chart as a pyramid of control and start viewing it as a learning neural network.
For leaders and managers, this requires a difficult but necessary paradigm shift: stepping down from the pedestal of infallibility. A leader who admits their mistakes empowers their team to do the same, opening channels of honest communication.
This involves replacing inquisitorial meetings with blameless post-mortems where the problem, not the person, is dissected.
This does not mean celebrating incompetence or repeated negligence. There is a significant distinction between making a mistake while attempting something novel or intricate, and making a mistake due to a lack of effort. However, transparency is needed to distinguish between the two.
Mistakes are the only real source of original data about our work. Successes confirm what we already knew we could do, whereas mistakes show us where our limits are and, above all, where new opportunities lie.
If 3M had fired Spencer Silver for his poor-quality glue, our offices today would be much less colourful and far more disorganised. If we want to build the companies of the future, we must learn to forgive human error and celebrate the learning that comes from it. After all, to err is human, but to learn from mistakes is strategic.