We tend to treat making a mistake as something to avoid at all costs.

It’s fairly common to plan, rehearse, polish, and play it safe because we want to get things right.

And while that shows care and attention, there’s also a quiet cost: the more control we seek, the more we grip ourselves, and the more we do that, the less space there is for connection, play and discovery.

Life gets duller and dimmer when we try to eliminate mistakes completely. As Seth Godin said, “If you rule out failure, you rule out innovation.”

Of course in some instances we want failure to be ruled out as far as possible – think of surgery for example. But when we try to eliminate mistakes it lands us in an awkward territory where we can’t communicate openly.

Improv offers a different invitation.

In improv, mistakes aren’t just tolerated—they’re accepted. In fact they aren’t just accepted they are acknowledged and used.

In an improvised scene, when one person stumbles, it’s not theirs to carry alone. Improvisation is teamwork and it has clear goals for content, style and effect. So when you forget something, Your fellow partners will acknowledge those moments (the audience sees them after all) and weave them into the story.

When we do this our ‘mistakes’ become something we own together – and as Matthew Syed’s book ‘Black Box Thinking’ shows – many surgical theatres (at least historically) have lacked the kind of transparency about mistakes that could have saved lives.

Whether we like it or not, mistakes happen and we can learn a lot about them by learning to work with them.  

Owning Our Mistakes

We often talk about “owning your mistake” as an individual act. And there are times when we need to take responsibility, apologise, and learn as individuals.

But something magical happens when you own a mistake and your team is right there beside you to turn it around.

Jazz improviser Louise Armstrong said it best, “It’s not the note you play that’s wrong. It’s the note you play afterwards that says whether it’s right or wrong.”