Look at a new pencil — about 7” of lead and a quarter-inch eraser. Now maybe that’s all that works structurally. But what expectation does it set? That we make very few mistakes, and then remove all traces of them. But for a learning organization, mistakes are how we course-correct. The CEO of one Fortune 500 company famously said that if he had senior people who hadn’t made a single big blunder over the years, they should be fired — because they clearly weren’t taking any chances of consequence. Are you and those around you expected to take chances…even if some of them may fail spectacularly?
