Tag: Mistakes

Mistakes, Learning, and Leadership in Lean

Mistakes are inevitable—but how leaders and organizations respond to them determines whether they improve or repeat the same failures. These posts explore mistakes through a Lean lens: system design vs. “human error,” psychological safety, learning cultures, and leadership behaviors that turn errors into improvement rather than blame.

Drawing from healthcare, manufacturing, aviation, sports, and everyday work, this archive focuses less on who failed—and more on what the system made possible.

Mistakes are inevitable; learning is not. These posts align with ideas I expanded on in The Mistakes That Make Us, which examines how leaders, cultures, and systems determine whether errors become liabilities—or catalysts for improvement.

Anthropic’s Claude Code Leak: Why the Instinct to Fire Someone Is...

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Last week, Anthropic accidentally leaked nearly 2,000 internal source code files for Claude Code, their AI coding tool. Within hours, the code was copied...

The One Thing ChatGPT Does That Most Leaders Won’t

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If you've used ChatGPT, you've seen the small text at the bottom of the screen: "ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info." I noticed it...

Before “Just Culture,” There Was NUMMI: Learning Instead of Blaming

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TL;DR: NUMMI proved in the 1980s what healthcare is still learning today: you can't punish your way to safety. Real improvement comes from mutual...

Ray Zinn on Learning from Mistakes — and Why “Fail Fast,...

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Ray Zinn argues that effective leadership isn't about failing fast, but about learning from mistakes by acknowledging them quickly, fixing them early, and not...

Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: November 28, 2025

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This edition of Ryan McCormack's Operational Excellence Mixtape highlights practical thinking on value creation, continuous improvement, and leadership in an AI-influenced world. From empowering...

Why Lean Leaders Should Be Thankful for Problems, Waste, and Mistakes

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At the hospital on Monday, a chaplain shared a Thanksgiving poem on the theme of being grateful. It struck a chord with me. As a Lean practitioner, it's easy to focus on the waste... the problems... the gaps. We think about what could be and the "ideal state." We strive for perfection and it's easy to lose site of what we have.

Unlearning Old Habits: What a Pickleball Mistake Taught Me About Feedback...

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What Pickleball Taught Me About Kindness, Kaizen, and Culture "Don't worry about your mistakes--you're learning." That's what an instructor said during my first 1x1 lesson at...

Delta’s $70,000 Slide Mistake Shows Why “Human Error” Is Really a...

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TL;DR: Emergency slide deployments happen far too often to be dismissed as "human error." When a mistake repeats at scale, it's a system design...

How Great Leaders Prevent Mistakes and Learn from the Ones That...

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I recently gave a virtual keynote for a global manufacturing company that's a customer of KaiNexus. Their leaders wanted to explore how to strengthen...

From Know-It-All to Learn-It-All: Leadership Lessons from Mistakes

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Lessons from my book The Mistakes That Make Us, plus conversations with Phillip Cantrell and Damon Lembi One of the central themes in my book, The...

Fred Noe of Jim Beam: Leadership Lessons on Mistakes, Innovation, and...

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TL;DR: Fred Noe of Jim Beam offers powerful leadership lessons on learning from mistakes, small-batch experimentation, and long-term thinking. His approach shows how psychological...

Dale Lucht on Leadership Habits That Sustain Lean Transformations

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In this episode of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast, Dale Lucht reflects on the leadership habits that separate short-lived Lean gains from lasting cultural...
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