Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Facing Failures...

It is wisely said that ‘to err is human’ which means… its natural for humans to commit errors. And the best thing to do after committing an error is to accept it, learn the reason of failure, and trying to avoid such circumstances in future.
That’s the perfect scenario, but in actual life we hide our mistakes, we are not able to accept that we did this thing wrong or we were not giving our full concentration to this work that’s why it failed. Whenever we are to face some failure, our first reaction is to think ideas to hide it or to put its blame on others. “I was told to do so” (So it’s not me, my PM is to be blamed, it’s his work to think, I am just obeying his orders).
Why is it so? To avoid the feeling of embarrassment in front of others? To avoid punishment/aftereffects?
Whatsoever, the reason may be, the thing is that by hiding our mistake, we cannot change a failure to success. The consequences of accepting a failure are lesser then not accepting it. If no one accepts his mistake at individual level, then this will be treated as a failure of whole team, whole organization, whole society, whole nation, whole country … and then … we are termed as a failed state.
This applies to everything: from failure of a software application in a software house to failure of security plan of VIPs in a country.
Lessons Learnt:
  • ·         No one is perfect; everyone makes mistakes in his life.
  • ·         If you make a mistake, and don’t learn anything from it, it’s likely that you will face the same situation again.
  • ·         Before raising your hand to point the blame of failure towards others, see if anything you could have done to save this situation?
  • ·         To learn from your mistake, the first step is to admit your part of failure. Not necessarily admitting in front of a crowd of people, but at least in front of one’s own self.
  • ·         If everyone starts accepting his mistakes, we can avoid an environment where everyone is blaming each other for failures.