To Err Is Divine
To Err Is Divine
The other day we had a discussion at work over certain mistakes that were made, and what we as a team could learn from them. That got me thinking about how the Torah does “error handling.”
None of us are perfect; we all fail sometimes. The question is what do we do with those failures.
We can sweep them under the rug and forget about them (or at least try to, in the end, we all know they will come back to bite us :), but that would make the whole experience a waste, a waste of time, effort, and a wasted opportunity.
Another option is to use these failures as an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and apply those lessons to help us, and others, avoid the same mistakes in the future.
This option transforms the failure. The failure is not seen anymore as a negative experience; instead, it is seen as the catalyst for growth, as the first step that allows the person to achieve the greatest heights. In fact, the Talmud says that “in the place where repentant people stand the most righteous people cannot stand.” The righteous person who never experienced the struggle of failure can not achieve the heights attained by someone who struggled, failed, and came out on the other end a better person.
The same can be said of our work in tech. Failure is virtually guaranteed in our jobs; what we do with those failures is what defines us as IT professionals.
We can either dig our heads in the sand, pretend nothing happened, or if it’s so bad that hiding it is impossible, assign the blame to someone else. The result of that will be fostering a toxic environment where, ironically, failures will keep happening with increasing frequency.
The better option would be to accept the failure, learn from it, and use it as an opportunity to grow as a developer and as a team.
What is the process of this transformation? How can we recast a negative into a positive?
One way is by applying the Torah’s algorithm known as Teshuvah (usually translated as “repentance,” though I prefer the more accurate translation of “return”).
Teshuvah requires three steps:
- Acknowledging your wrongdoing.
- Verbal confession.
- Resolution for the future.
Applying these three steps to our lives in tech we can see that to truly learn from our mistakes we must:
1) Own up to the fact that we did, in fact, make a mistake.
2) talk it over, discuss it as a team, analyze what processes and blindspots allowed this mistake to occur, and
3) take action items to implement the lessons learned so that we don’t repeat them in the future.
Failures provide us with valuable opportunities. If we learn not to waste them we will see that while to err is human, growing from our errors allows us to touch the divine.