Mistakes in Not Making Mistakes

The past year seems to have yielded various waves of content celebrating making mistakes. Advancing the “failure at the heart of innovation” theme seems to have become a cause célèbre for the creativity and innovation set.

Celebrating mistakes as part of innovation was the topic of a July Innochat on Twitter on innovation failure and, most recently, a Wall Street Journal article on “Better Ideas through Failure.”

I grew up with a clear perfectionist streak (or whatever term you would use to suggest whatever is deeper, wide, and more permanent than a “streak”), I wrestle with a gleeful attitude toward failure.

Yet between Kathryn Schulz’s TED talk “On Being Wrong” and recognition of my own experiences where learning from something that did not succeed as planned has led to much better future results, openness to errors clearly has its place in creativity and innovation.

However, I think celebrating mistakes in and of themselves is an easy banner for behaviours that don’t come easily to many people or many organizations, for that matter.

It’s not so much organizations are celebrating failure as the willingness to move forward on efforts before everything is figured out and an appreciation for learning when something doesn’t go right.


Being Bad at Making Mistakes
What really needs to happen in an organization to benefit from an apparent willingness to celebrate and reward failure?

Instead of listing behaviors for celebrating mistakes (which I started to do but failed to complete), it’s much easier to list mistakes individuals and organizations make at making mistakes.

Thinking through the personal perfectionist demons I’ve had to try (and still try) to slay, here are eight mistakes that can shut you off from productive failure:

1. Being afraid of fear
2. Not being able to manage or tolerate ample levels of risk
3. Becoming easily embarrassed – either personally or organizationally
4. Failing to properly frame and learn from experiments
5. Being uncomfortable with unanswered questions
6. Doing a bad job of making assumptions which allow you to keep making progress
7. Focusing too strongly on too much detail
8. Not being able to fix things as you go

To read the full article visit the Innovation Excellence website

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Tamiflu Scarcity, Pharmacists Make Their Own Sugary Mixture - NYTimes.com

With Tamiflu Scarce, Sugary Mix Is Not What the Doctor Ordered - NYTimes.com

With the liquid children's version of the anti-influenza drug Tamiflu in short supply, pharmacists are making their own children's version by mixing cherry syrup with the contents of the Tamiflu capsules.

But not just any cherry syrup. The prescribing information for Tamiflu lists cherry syrup made by the Humco Holding Group "a mixture of sugar, purified water, artificial cherry flavoring and some other common ingredients” as one of the approved liquids to mix with the medicine.

Lucky Humco has been scrambling to keep up with the demand. So it's not just boom time for th epharma companies, others are jumping on board the sweet money train.

"Our volume has exploded," said Greg Pulido, the chief executive of Humco, based in Texarkana, Tex. "About 30 days ago we got a phone call. We got another phone call. Then we started getting calls from all over the world."

The company typically sells about 50,000 pint-size bottles of the syrup each year. But with the spread of pandemic H1N1 influenza, also known as swine flu, Humco shipped 100,000 bottles in September alone. In October it is planning to make 400,000 bottles.

The company has had to have some ingredients shipped to its factory by air in order to meet the surge of orders, Mr. Pulido said. Last week the factory worked seven days instead of the usual four. But he said that contrary to rumors, there was no shortage of the syrup, and that he was confident there would not be.

The liquid version of Tamiflu is scarce because Roche, the manufacturer of the drug, is concentrating on making the capsules used by adults and older children, which it says is a quicker way to increase world supplies. The same production capacity needed to produce a liquid treatment for one person can be used to make capsules for more than 10 people, Roche says.

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