This is a guest contribution by Dr. Darina Goldin, Director of Data Science at Bayes Esports in Berlin. If you would like to submit a contribution please contact Bill Beatty for submission details. Thank you.

Making mistakes at work sucks! In the best case, it’s just a blow on your ego, in the worst case you might take your company with you. Just recently we had to give up a beloved project because of all the mistakes we had made developing it. It felt terrible! And yet here we are, advocating that we don’t just embrace mistakes but want to build our entire culture around them.

Because, frankly, what other options are there? Mistakes will happen, regardless of if you want them to or not. If you focus on avoiding them at any cost, you will over-engineer your products and have development times so long, they themselves will become mistakes. So instead let’s treat mistakes as a part of everyday life.

It’s less scary than it sounds – you just need to have a plan for when a mistake happens and execute it. It can be as simple as four points: communicate, understand, fix, and prevent from happening again. This plan works for both individual (“I put a bug in the code”, “I emailed the wrong person”) and company level (“We took too long to develop a product”, “Nobody wants to use it”) mistakes.