TED Talk

So some roughly ten years ago, we introduced the error culture in our company. Sounds strange? Probably because it is. One might argue that you don’t just "introduce" some cultural change, but that is what we did and the recipe was pretty much cookie-cutter: We declare this to have been introduced, then get some sufficiently high-up manager to give a talk about some the fuck-ups they have caused to assure everyone that even the best of us make mistakes, and we’re done. Easy enough, right? Well, if you are wondering at what point we lost our error culture - we didn’t. In the end, you can’t just wish cultural change into being.

Now, that is not to say that we don’t really want to have an error culture - quite the opposite. It means openness. Learning. Psychological safety. It sounds great. In fact, it sounds so good, I’ve barely ever actually seen anyone admit a real mistake. Isn’t that odd? Because if we truly embraced mistakes, wouldn’t we see more of them? Publicly, I mean. With ownership. Reflection. Change. Instead, what we get is something else entirely.

That phrase. Everyone has seen it at some point: 'Mistakes are fine, as long as you learn from them.' I personally get very mixed feelings from this. One the one side the attempt at being generous, providing emotional safety, supporting courage and experimentation, on the other side this almost threat-like "but woe to you if you ever make the same mistake twice!"

The concept still sounds totally reasonable, though. We certainly don’t want to have our people run around, do random nonsense and simply shrug off the potentially dire consequences. However, there are two hidden assumptions underneath: First: That you can learn from any mistake Second: That understanding it will automatically teach you how to do it right next time.

But the world is messy. Oftentimes, the situation is so complex, we don’t actually know what went wrong. Or why. Or how to avoid it next time. Remember "I have not failed. I’ve just found 10.000 ways that won’t work,"?

Sometimes, we can go left or go right. We go left. Everything changes. Was the turn a mistake? Would the other option have been better?

What does 'learning' even look like here? And what does that mean for our error culture? So we can have a really hard time making sure we get it right the next time, but that’s what, in all its generosity, is asked of us. So what do we do? We simply don’t make mistakes - much easier!

Ok, so how does this work? Imagine you’re a developer in a Zühlke development team. There is literally no way you can ever make a mistake! First: "top performance"! One of our big four values. Making mistakes doesn’t exactly sound like top performance, so you had better not. Second: The scrum methodology postulates the dev team to be some kind of super hero league who could save the entire world and would even do so, if you just make everything about them and have them do things in whatever way they please. Third: Our clients are big fans of this "first time right" thing. I mean yeah, you can do all your agile mumbo-jumbo but if I tell you what I want, there is no reason you should need more than one attempt to make it happen.

Does that sound like a place to make bold decisions and take responsibility for when things go awry? Didn’t think so. The devs don’t either. Let’s have a look.

Retrospectives should be our place to reflect honestly. But I observe them as being mostly bullet-dodging rituals. Not everything perfect? We blame vague requirements. Unclear expectations. The client.

Anything that even hints at the team doing something wrong is carefully avoided.

And then there are the tools we use. Story points? Great. You start with T-Shirt sizes to begin with and add like 50 dimensions of variability to it. Good luck deriving anything from that.

Velocity? - It rises and falls, and no one knows why.

Technical debt? = "We have bad code quality, but it is all due to shortcuts you forced us to take."

Mistakes? Nowhere to be found. We hide them in data, in euphemisms, in process language.

Quick question: I just bought a lottery ticket and won a million euros. Good decision or bad decision? Good decision: Well, I have a million euros now, pray tell me how this could ever be a bad thing! Bad decision: Buying a lottery ticket nothing but paying for a dream that is so unlikely to come true you might just as well start digging for gold in your backyard.

There is no wrong answer. These are both valid points of view! The question is whether you judge the action by itself or by its outcome.

When we do things right, we’ll be successful and if we do them wrong, then we’ll be on the receiving end of it.

There’s this study from UC Berkeley. They had students play Monopoly. Only one twist: One of them started with more money, got to roll two dice instead of one, and would get twice the reward when passing Go. A blatant advantage.

Well, guess who won. And no, there is no "gotcha" here, of course the player with the advantage won. Always. Monopoly is a snowbally game with no comeback mechanics - you get the advantage, you win. Period.

The interesting part is what happend during and after the game. As the favored players got more and more ahead, the began to act more dominant. They were louder, they were more confident, they would start bragging about how well they were doing. And when afterwards asked about why they won, there was not a single player that would even mention the fact that the game had been completely rigged. Not only that, they had managed to make themselves believe that it had been their skill and their decision-making that had won them the game. Even with the unfairness of the situation staring blatantly in their face, they’d cling to the narrative of their own grandeur.

Now this may sound outright crazy, but the idea of an immediate causality between your actions and their outcome is deeply ingrained in our society.

The very foundation of the american society is what is called "The American Dream" - the belief that you can achieve whatever you want if you only work hard enough. And, of course, its corrolary: If you are unsuccessful, then it must be you who is the culprit. The more radical re

We do this all the time. We confuse outcome with value. And when we believe that success is proof of merit, of having done the right thing, then failure must be proof of having done the wrong thing. Of inability. Of incompetence. Of guilt.

This is the heart of the problem. The belief that there is this cogent causality between our actions and our success or lack thereof.

But what exactly is the problem? When we are confronted with success, we’ll happily ignore all the mistakes we may have made along the way. When we fail, we’ll try really hard to find reasons that are unconnected to ourselves.

We need to flip the script. We need to accept that the only thing we have under control are our behaviours, our actions and the decisions we make. If we want to grow as people, if we want ourselves and others confidently take actions and make decisions the virtues of which we believe in, we need to judge the merits of our actions regardless of their outcome.

Let’s look at an example. I am currently in a project where the client wants me to do what at that point is getting close to manual labour. Looking at their processes, I easily identified several ways of making significant improvements with limited effort so they can save a lot of money down the line. Now imagine the (yet) fictional scenario of the client kicking me out based on me "not doing what he is supposed to be doing".

Let’s analyse this: → actions → decisions → behaviour → outcome

We treat outcomes as proof of good or bad behavior. But outcomes are noisy. Unreliable. Often random.

What we can judge is behavior. Was the decision well-informed? Courageous? Ethical? Transparent?

That’s what we need to reward. Not just success.

The foundation of real error culture isn’t acceptance of mistakes. It’s acceptance of humanity. Of uncertainty. Of the courage to act, even when the outcome is unclear.

That’s psychological safety.

So if you want a healthy error culture, stop worshipping success. Stop judging outcomes.

Start paying attention to the choices people make. The risks they take. The responsibility they show.

Because in the end, action is everything. Outcome is nothing.

But there’s one more thing we need to admit: the outside world doesn’t care.

For clients, shareholders, the market — only the outcome matters. You can make the best decision in the world, but if the results aren’t there, you will still be judged as if you failed.

In many consulting firms — McKinsey comes to mind — this outside pressure is passed directly to the employees. 1:1. If the client’s unhappy, someone gets blamed. If a pitch fails, someone pays. And what that creates is a culture of permanent high-stakes anxiety.

It’s not a culture of ownership. It’s a culture of survival.

That’s why we must build organizations that push in the other direction. That offer an internal counterweight to the brutal simplicity of the outside world.

Yes, top management doesn’t have that luxury. They carry the full weight of the company. Their failures become headlines. Their outcomes are non-negotiable.

But the rest of us — we need a net. A space where behavior is valued. Where risk is allowed. Where good decisions are recognized, even if they don’t lead to wins.

Because if we don’t create that space, we will end up punishing the very courage we claim to want. And that will destroy us. Quietly. Efficiently. Completely.

Thank you.