Learning from mistakes

I once heard a (probably famous) business expert saying that he had more faith in the business judgement of someone who has had a business failure or gone bankrupt at least once. Something like that anyway. The point being that you learn so much more when things go wrong.

If you have a healthy approach to 'failure'. There's a whole story in itself about how we, people and cultures, view, deal with and comment on 'failures'. But my point here is to see what this idea does for the now traditional 'best practice' approach to sharing learning.

What about sharing 'disaster learning'? Or 'cock-up creativity'? Or some other vulgar buzz-word. I roughly agree with the sentiment; I think disasters, crises, failures, cock-ups and so on are full of extremely rich learning. And they also offer the opportunity to have a laugh at what goes wrong. You know, 'you'll never believe what happened next...', while at the same time learning what came out of it. It's very hard not to become a bit patronising or pretensious, (well for me anyway), when trying to talk about 'best practice'. The implication is always, 'this what we did, and it's pretty damn good'.

So, in talking about part of a conference format, what about a light-hearted competition for the most productive disaster? People can present their stories and what they learned from it, and maybe bring out other similar experiences from those listening.

I can see some risky aspects to this, but hey, this is just thinking out loud ...