Why do I believe that a culture that doesn’t embrace making mistakes can be a toxic work place?
I’ve come at this from the individual and hiring perspective, but this is more of from a team culture side. If we can’t make mistakes, then there’s a perfection standard that’s unrealistic to strive towards. I think I believe it because of my experiences at workplaces.
At 2U, it’s perfectly reasonable and expected to make mistakes, and almost encouraged. So we can learn. It’s just data points.
I didn’t always have this mindset. Growing up, I think I thought that I had to be perfect. The school setting and structure instills that mindset. That there is a quantifiable correct and incorrect way of doing things. That there are right answers. In STEM related fields, sure the answer is convergent. But in other areas, they are divergent. And that’s what I’m doing more of now professionally.
It’s not just the quantifiable part though, it’s that people were made to feel better than or less than based on those scores. The scores became a part of your personality and even your identity. “I am smart because I got a 4.0 GPA.” “I am dumb because I got a C in this class.” The thing is there wasn’t as much, at least to my knowledge, some version of a Performance Improvement Plan at school for people who did get lower grades. If you got a lower grade on an assignment or test or class, you just kept moving on without addressing it fully. And then especially when you start compounding the topics, then of course the people who haven’t mastered the basics yet will be even more behind.
School wasn’t as much a toxic place for me but I obviously know some reasons why they were for others. And a big place of that is the attitude towards making mistakes. I was taught through my parents academically to focus on the glass half empty. That even if I got a 95% on something, then the first comment was ‘What happened to the other 5%.’ There was no negative intention there but when you keep focusing on only the areas for improvement, then it can become draining.
I can feel like I don’t want to open up about mistakes because I know what they’ll say. I will feel judged. It doesn’t foster an open relationship. I believe it has to be a both glass half full and half empty approach. Both things are true at the same time. The non-dualistic approach to this situation. It wasn’t a toxic relationship with the parents but it could have been more growing up.
If we play it forward and go deeper, then any misconstruction of this may be because of the belief of right and wrong. This fundamental belief exists in basically everything. That there’s a right way to do something and a wrong way to do something. What if we approach one of these ‘wrong ways’ as a ‘right way that hasn’t been done yet.’? Even in a convergent setting like a math problem, what if the student or teacher keep exploring that route? That way, they’ll at least learn to go deep in whatever they are doing.
Standing up and doing problems publicly at the front of the class room and potentially making a mistake would have been embarrassing. I think I had too high of an ego / view of myself, mostly due to my high grades and scores. So I had a certain reputation. That I was a smart student who rarely makes mistakes. Then that association went into my identity layer. And when I would make mistakes, that wouldn’t align with my beliefs about myself.
The math problem example above can apply more to higher level math. But what about early childhood math, like 2 digit addition and subtraction or multiplication with 20 and < 400 division. Those whiteboard races of who could complete problems quicker was not a great imprint, looking back. There would be a winner and a loser. That’s not a great way to teach kids that it’s okay to make mistakes. I think it could have been more collaborative.
I think an ideal ratio of type of activity is 40-50% individual, 40-50% collaborative, and 10% competitive. I think it’s still valuable to have some sort of friendly competition but that should be very low time and energy wise. Instead, focusing on the student making any growth should be commended and celebrated.
But then comes the question of how can you measure growth if not quantitatively? Doesn’t that have be quantifiable in some way?
I think some things have to be quantifiable and some things don’t have to be. It’s when we fit everything into a discrete rationality that causes the continuous to lose its beauty. I think one reason behind this belief is the saying ‘seeing is believing.’ That everything has to be proven scientifically and physically.
Growth is not just seen. It’s felt. It’s at the deepest level, part of who we’ve become. What we do is just a result of who we are. So we’ve taken the scientific revolution and advancement to one extreme end of the spectrum. We’ve limited who we are to what we do since that’s what can be scientifically and mathematically proven. And then we’ve equated who we are to only what we do. But that’s just one dimension of us.
So what if we didn’t try to qualify that type of growth? It’s more of a feeling. So we should be teaching teachers more about using feelings and intuition to guide their classes. In addition to numbers to quantify what is necessary. There has to be a balance, an equilibrium. We’ve gone too far on the spectrum of rationalization.
We think that science and religion are at two opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s always posed as science vs. religion. But what if we think about science as a religion?
Our religion has become science-based. Everything has to be proven or replicated or improved. That it can be a balance on the spectrum between Faith-Based Religion to Science-Based Religion.
If you make a decision that’s solely based on faith without any ‘rationality’, then you’re labeled as crazy and delusional. But how come we don’t say the same thing on the other end with having everything backed scientifically or mathematically to make a decision? Aren’t they just two sides of the same coin? With the advancement of tech, it’s just become the societal norm to base everything factually and dismiss anything that can’t be proven.
Hmm, going even a level deeper is the question-answer spectrum. That is one of the deepest roots, if not the deepest root, of all of science and math and rationality. Science explains things rationally. Explanation is the result of asking a question. So when we ask a question, we’re expecting a directly correlated answer. That’s what science is.
We think that the question and answer are two separate things. But again, a non-dualistic approach would mean that the question and answer are really just two difference forms of the same thing. We’re expecting a 1-to-1 relationship with the question and answer. ‘This is the answer to this question.” On an infinite scale.
We’ve I think tried to organize the Universe in our minds as many 1-to-1 relationships when actually it’s just a single many-many relationship.
Faith-based religion (generally speaking) is many-to-one or one-to-many, depending on how you look at it. Science-based religion is looking at it 1-1. Combining both, though, you can ‘see’ that it’s many-many.
[see pics]
This perspective is a one-to-many relationship. But if you look at this from the side, then it’s a 1-to-1 relationship.
However, there are more ‘invisible’ relationships that we can’t ‘see’ with our eyes but we can feel. Saying one of these is the ‘right answer’ is both right and wrong. From one perspective, you’re right. From another perspective, you’re wrong. From yet another perspective, it’s both and neither.
This causes it to be many-to-many when you combine both aspects of it. Which is the balanced approach on this spectrum.
Faith-based religion organized it as many-to-one relationship with the many people to one God or higher power. Science-based religion organized it as a one-to-one relationship. It’s two perspectives on the same thing. It’s like looking at an ice cream cone. One angle will look like a circle, one angle will look like a triangle, another one may look like a tear drop, and so on. But it’s all really the same. But by extrapolating and forcing the entire Universe into a series of 1-to-1 relationships, we’ve limited what the Universe actually is.
Even in this journaling, it’s a microcosm of the macrocosm. I asked one question and you were probably expecting to get an answer to that one question. However, I answered many questions along the way, both asked and unasked. This is the playing out in real time of a many-to-many relationship. So in the end, the question is the answer. And the answer is the question.
If you feel perplexed or repulsed by the fact that I didn’t answer the original question with a direct answer or with a bulleted summary, then maybe it’s time to dig deeper into your own beliefs about questions, answers, and the potential dogmatism towards science and rationality.
Comments