Making mistakes is part of being human. We are not perfect, and we will mess up. The important thing is to learn what to do when mistakes happen, rather than obsessing over trying to avoid them. The former leads to a Don’t-Make-A-Mistake Culture, which we discussed in the last article. But in order to know how to respond to a mistake, we first need to understand why mistakes happen.
We can use the acronym SLY to help us figure out why a mistake happened. SLY stands for Structure, Leadership, You.
85% of the time, a problem comes from a mistake in Structure. 10% of the time, the mistake is in Leadership, with expectations not being clearly communicated. Only 5% of the time does the reason behind a mistake lie with You, meaning it’s a deliberate mistake.
Oftentimes when diagnosing a mistake, we jump straight to assuming it’s a You problem, although it rarely is. This contributes to a Don’t-Make-A-Mistake Culture. In order to help cultivate a Create-Something Culture in our organizations, we should use SLY to correctly identify the source of a mistake.
Structure
85% of the time, a mistake occurs because of an issue with Structure. Here at The Crossroad, we say that “structure demands behavior.” By this, we mean that the structures that exist in your organization—the protocols, incentives, discipline, rules, values, and the way you follow them—dictate the behavior that the members of the organization will participate in.
For example, if a professor has a strict policy of counting a student absent if they arrive to class late, students will be more likely to show up early than they will for a professor that doesn’t take attendance. If a professor wants to shift the culture of her class to be one where students arrive early, she shouldn’t lecture them about timeliness. Rather, she should set up a structure that will incentivize promptness and de-incentivize lateness.
Leadership
10% of the time, the source of a mistake is due to Leadership. The job of the leader is, in part, to set up clear expectations for those they lead to follow. We visualize this with the help of the Freedom V. If a member of your organization doesn’t know what the hard lines of the V are, how can they be expected to stay inside the lines!
Continuing our example of the professor, let’s say that she has set the structure of marking students absent if they are late, and yet students consistently arrive after the start of class. She has the structure in place, so what’s wrong? Here, the problem might be that the professor hasn’t made the students aware of the structure that’s in place. There’s nothing on this professor’s syllabus about expectations for tardiness and attendance, so students don’t know what the consequences for being marked absent are. The expectations, and consequences for not meeting them, need to be clear in order for proper behavior to follow.
You
5% of the time, the reason for a mistake does lie with You, the person who made the mistake. Sometimes people do make willful mistakes, but it rarely happens. And we should not assume when a mistake happens that it was either on purpose or that the person is to blame.
Say in this college class that the professor has set a structure for tardiness and lateness, has outlined this policy in the syllabus and went over it on the first day of class. But there is one student who is consistently late, although he has been reminded of the policy. In this case, the structure has been set in place, and the student is aware of the expectations, so it would seem that there is another external issue preventing them from meeting expectations.
In the next article, we will look at how to have a conversation with this student using the Moment of Truth framework. We first need to check that the structure and leadership are in place before assuming a mistake is a “you” problem.
Gracie McBride is the Content and Systems Development Coordinator at The Crossroad.
