Making new mistakes is hard. The old are easy. How to change it?
The year 2019 started for me and my teams with the New Years intention to make new mistakes.
Are you grinning right now?
That is probably because you relate to the subject. Making old mistakes is easy. We do not want this to happen but every now and then we are confronted with the fact that we are repeating our mistakes.
Habits, habits and habits
We are all creatures of habits. In our personal life as well as at the job. On top of that we are as Project Managers conditioned by the Project Methods we follow. The deliverables “Lessons Learnt” and “Closing Report for Steering” are just a couple examples. We deliver them and then? Is the new project that starts after yours, looking at your Lessons Learnt? Are they acting on the recommendations? Is the Steering interested in how much money is not spoiled on old mistakes? Nope.
Stop spoiling money and effort on old mistakes
By accepting that we are habits trigged we have half of the solution. We need to establish new habits. And that is hard work for all involved. Do we need to put effort into this? I do not know your specific situation but in general 4 to 13% of the project budget is spoiled on stuff you could avoid by not repeating old mistakes. Nice isn’t it?
How to?
A good start is to have a focus point. Beside the out loud spoken intention, I used a replica of the tile you see in the left corner and put it in our project room, so we looked at it daily. It did remind us at our intention and brought the subject in several occasions to the table.
We started the habit of asking ourselves the question out loud “Have we seen this before?”. By doing this we were creating a new habit and we were using previously used solutions or insights more quickly. The downside is that we didn’t had any experience with the new mistakes, but our new habits were helping us out. Creating new habits is work in progress so don’t be too hard on yourself. Be honest, laugh about your own stupidity and move on. Describe the mistake and the work around. Be sure to keep on making new mistakes.
Keep on growing.
Hello! I just would like to give you a huge thumbs up for your great info you have got right here on this post. I am coming back to your site for more soon.