Mistakes & Learning

I’ve been working through Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, a really fine book that explores the neuroscience behind how we make decisions. In one of the early chapters, Lehrer describes the role dopamine neurons play in decision-making. Essentially, they are those elements of the brain that register experience and create emotions. Interestingly, these neurons actually learn from experience. That is, they take note of successes and failures and improve their predictive performance (creating an emotion before something actually occurs – pleasure at the sight of an ice cream cone, anxiety when noticing that the back door to the house is open). Moreover, they learn the most from failures, from mistakes.

As it turns out, making mistakes – and analyzing them – is a key to any kind of learning. Whether playing backgammon, shooting billiards, throwing a football, learning calculus, starting a new company, preaching a sermon, or leading an organization – making lots of mistakes is essential to developing competence. Lehrer quotes Niels Bohr, a contemporary and colleague of Einstein, commenting that an expert is “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field” (51).

I’d just about guarantee that we’ve each experienced learning from our mistakes first hand. For instance, I’ve said many times – mostly joking – that rather than take a salary I probably should have paid my first congregation for all that I learned through the mistakes I made with them. In spite of how much we learn from our mistakes, however, two things regularly stand in the way of freeing us to embrace them as valuable and encourage others to do the same.

1) Fear of failure. We live in a society and culture that quickly equates mistakes not with developing competence but with incompetence. This starts, I think, in our schools, with an emphasis on grades assigned not by what we’ve learned but our performance on tests (and, no, they are not the same thing!). Test-based education creates an atmosphere of risk avoidance because we fear making mistakes.

2) The actual cost of mistakes. There is some reason for our fear of failure, and that is that mistakes can cost, sometimes dearly, in terms of time, energy, and investment. So we tend to play it safe, rarely risking anything new or learning from our mistakes not just from fear of seeming incompetent but for fear of squandering resources.

But here’s the thing: invention demands failure. We’ve all heard stories about how many times Thomas Edison failed in trying to create the light bulb before succeeding, but I’m not sure we’ve taken it to heart. No invention comes without lots of failure. That’s as true of trying out a new preaching method or teaching strategy as it is inventing a light bulb or airplane. So how can we find a way to celebrate failure and in this way cultivate a spirit of innovation that may help us solve some of the significant challenges we face today? I’d suggest three things.

1) Emphasize – in the classroom, church, home, work, etc. – hugging what we don’t know instead of clinging to what we do. I’ve written before about the importance of not just admitting but claiming what we don’t know because it’s there that we learn the most. Indeed, I’d suggest that we need to rethink recognizing what we don’t know as one of the surest signs of intelligence there is. That means that we need to find a way to reward questions and failed experiments as much as we do perfect test scores.

2) Remember that the point isn’t just making mistakes, but learning from them. One of the teachers both of our kids have enjoyed tells her kids, “Make a mistake everyday; but make it a different one!” We can cultivate an atmosphere where mistakes and failures are celebrated by taking time to learn from them and in this way showing how valuable they are.

3) Make “little bets” before you make big ones. As Peter Sims points out in his book Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, small failures that you can afford can pave the way to significant learning, discovery, and innovation. So think small – try out a hundred little ideas and affordable experiments before narrowing down what has the most chance of success.

If we want to learn, we need to be prepared to fail. So let the mistakes begin!