Every mistake is a learning opportunity

We’re about to embark on the largest hiring and marketing bump in the history of my little company. With growth come not just pains but the inevitable fix cycle to prepare and execute the company plan.

That sounds all nice and pretty, strategery as George Bush would put it, but the reality of the situation is pretty grim. At it’s most pessimistic level, it is a week of grueling torture where you are forced to sit through months and years of your mistakes in a slow and drawn out process attacking virtually every vital statistic of what you’ve dedicated your professional life to.

Once the shaming is done comes the realization that there are two ways to fix it (three, if you consider burning the place to the ground for insurance money and keeping a straight face while trying to explain how 30+ data center suddenly melted down): throw more people at the problem or throw away more money. Then you sit and watch people draw on the whiteboard, or pretty binders, their plan and recommended course of action.

Then when the plan is together and we actually start the hard work of bringing everything to perfection you as the leader get to hear all over that this stuff is so easy, how come we never did it all along…. which is sort of like giving everyone on your payroll a free license for kicks in the family jewels. Repeatedly. Daily.

Every mistake is a learning opportunity. Cultivating the process of continuous learning, change and adaptation across everything we do is something we still haven’t figured out completely. But it is something we’re trying to do.

But with this new plan we’re taking a week a month to attack top 10 problems with our company. This way we can fix the little problems as we go along without allowing them to become giant problems that we can’t do anything about. As we grow, it’s important to keep the standard of quality.

The only difficult part is coming to terms with spending a week each month on the floor in a fetal position while the ego and the crotch are repeatedly deflated and swollen to the point of looking like a coconut tree.