For decades, practitioners and researchers have highlighted the criticality of creating learning organizations. Too often, however, all that advocacy misses or suppresses a key point: Learning depends first on admitting, “I just don’t know.” Until that’s confessed, there’s no void to fill with new discovery and insights, and no new ideas that can be put into better action. Instead, we’re stuck redoing what we’ve been doing, no matter how inadequate that has been.
Mark Graban has already made immeasurable contributions to our understanding about operational excellence, and he adds to that considerable value-add with The Mistakes That Make Us by detailing what it looks and feels like to admit flubs, mistakes, and errors, to say as a regular practice, “I just don’t know,” thereby building the foundation for greater accomplishments.”
- Steven J. Spear, DBA, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and author of The High-Velocity Edge