Msitakes

Last Monday I mentioned a mistake that was made on one of our projects. Today, I will explain Mike's Theory of msitakes (Mistakes). But first a story:

23 years ago in another life, I was Director of Architecture for a large corporate Architectural/Engineering firm in Tulsa. The firm had about 50 of staff and I was over almost 30 of them. One day, one of our construction observers can to my office to report a problem with one of our large projects. The service elevator had been installed and the elevator "would not reach 2nd Floor!" It lacked 18". In my disbelief, I asked how such a thing could happen. How and why would the install it in that fashion. He explained That the building was laid out and constructed from the structural drawings. He went further and explained that the architectural plans shown the distance between first and second floor different distances depending on which drawing was used (the 18" difference. He said that whoever reviewed and approved the elevator drawings used the incorrect architectural details (and thus the mistake). I, as any manager type had been trained thus, asked who approved the drawings. Walter, the construction guy, replied, " We don't need to go there. Let's just decide that to do about it." The look on his face made me see his embarrassment and I pressed further. "Walter, I want to know who did this." He deferred once more. I pressed again. He saw it was futile and turned bright red and stammered, "You did."

To say the least, I learned and important lesson. A $15,000.00 lesson (1986 dollars).

Mike's rules for mistakes from that day forward became:

1. What is the problem?

2. What is the solution?

3. Which party is responsible for the correction? (Only if cost is involved) Not which person is responsible. If the team is going to accept responsibility for a job well done, it must as a team accept responsibility for the problem.

4. Correct it and move ahead.

5. Make it a learning experience.

When I put too emphasis on who checked the elevator drawings, I in fact placed blame. On me!

In fact the problem started when someone put the wrong floor to floor dimensions on the drawings. It continued when no one coordinated with the engineer's drawings. The contractor did not fully review the detail. And I kept the mistake alive.

I am not very quick in assigning blame to others for mistakes. I have made my share too.

The other thing I have learned that in business (and in life) is the quicker a mistake is corrected (and owned) the easier the rest of the project goes.