Mistakes, we all make them but how many of us turn these into opportunities? One of the things that set successful companies apart from the others is how they deal with mistakes. Successful organizations turn mistakes to their advantage. Mistakes are hidden opportunities; you just have to recognize them for what their potential is. In Thomas Edison’s famous quote when asked about his failures in trying to create the light bulb, he stated that he hadn’t failed, but had discovered 1,000 ways not to make the light bulb. By eliminating those things that didn’t work, he was closer to what would work. He was turning mistakes and failures into opportunities. He was learning from those mistakes and working towards success. If we can learn from the mistakes or failures and don't repeat them, we can profit in the future. Profiting from our mistakes (learning opportunities) is not always monitary. Sometimes the profit is in the form of self esteem, respect, trust,etc.

In Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, Gladwell states that to become a master at something you need to spend 10,000 hours at it. He references examples in sports, medicine, business, etc. What this is really saying is that in every industry and every profession you have to practice over and over again to master something. The reason that practice is nessecary and expected is because we will make mistakes and we need to learn those lessons. If we weren't making mistakes then practice wouldn't be necessary. The key is learning from those mistakes and sticking with it long enough to master it and profit from it.

To begin gaining from our lessons learned, take one or two things that were learned and determine how to improve things for the future. If you try to change the world all at once it becomes overwhelming but if we change one thing and see that change through to conclusion, we can be successful. Limiting ourselves to changing only one thing at a time allows us to focus and put our energy into making that one change successful. Once that change has been successfully implemented we can look at changing the next thing and over time we have made significant changes.

In my opinion, the best way to learn is to create a lessons learned process that you can repeat. The process and tools can be very simple, collect data about what went well as well as what went wrong. Once initial feedback has been collected a lessons learned meeting should be held to review everything and expand on points or get closure. The goal of this meeting is to identify items requiring improvement, not to lay blame. Don’t forget to identify the things that were done well too. You want to ensure that you repeat those things as much as you want to change the things that can be improved. The output from the process should be a document that describes the lessons learned and which items are to be acted upon.

The tools for conducting a lesson learned are already available in every business. Create a directory or folder on your server/computer to store documents containing the lesson learned and use your existing word processing software. Online surveys are a great tool for collecting data and allowing the source of the information to remain anonymous. It may also include other forms of documentation used to arrive at the lessons, such as fishbone diagrams used to identify root causes. The recording method should remain consistent between projects or lessons learned sessions so progress can be tracked.

Sometimes, even when we know better we need to fail to re-learn a lesson or re-affirm why we do things a certain way. In other words we fall off the bandwagon. Over time we forget why we created a particular process or don't offer a particular feature or service or whatever the case might be. When this happens we experience the pain again and reaffirm the original lesson. We are experiencing the lesson again and being provided with an opportunity once again.