In August 2018, the right to make mistakes was introduced into French legislation, allowing individuals and companies to " be able to make mistakes in their declarations to the administration without risking a sanction for the first breach ". A decision widely commented on in the international press, who saw in it the intention of the French legislator to set an example on this famous " right to make mistakes ", which all the literature on the transformation of the economy and society talks about? But what exactly does this concept of the right to make mistakes cover and how can it actually be exercised in the business world? Decryption.

What's the mistake ?

Derived from the Latin errare, meaning " to wander", error proceeds from an adventure that leads the mind not to take the path planned by the will. It indicates a kind of derailment in our ways of doing things that leads to a result other than the one we intended.

Do not confuse the error with :

• Failure: as the concept of serendipity explains, error can lead to discoveries that are as crucial as they are surprising, such as the Lascaux cave, the microwave, Viagra, dynamite or Nutella...  Failure is therefore neither final nor fatal : in fact, the term " fail" originally refers to a ship, when it is accidentally immobilized. Therefore, failure is not the same as sinking, and nothing prevents us from leaving for other horizons once the ship has been repaired !

• Fault : fault has a moral and legal dimension, it is a breach of a notion of duty, whether the latter is institutionalised (in the law for example) or finds its source in ethics and/or deontology.

• Deception : deception introduces a properly relational and intentional dimension. Fraud or manipulation are thus deceptive acts intended to mislead others, but the perpetrator of the deception acts in full awareness of the facts.

• Stupidity : stupidity is the result of a deficit of judgment. If the error can possibly be produced by stupidity, it is not necessarily so.

• The wrong decision : most often inentiential because it is the result of cognitive biases, this blunder is often a time bomb. The wrong decision will produce its effects long after it has been executed, at the risk of producing an accumulation of failures and malfunctions.

Individual error, collective error...

The error is made by individuals. But it can also be collective. In his latest book, The Paradoxes of Cooperation, Patrick Scharnitzky (editor's note, speaker at EVE) explains : " The group is a living system, bubbling with intersubjectivities and multiple influences that can lead it to collective errors that are sometimes serious because the decisions it makes are often validated without debate on the altar of the law of large numbers. How can we imagine that several intelligent people who are discussing can, all of them, make mistakes and lead the collective into errors of judgement and decision-making deadlocks? »

The interest of combining perfection with the imperfect

Well, at this point, we can already recognize that the mistake makes us anxious. Yet, isn't it inevitable ? In the movement of optimalism and the acceptance of our wholeness as human beings, the notion of the " right to make mistakes " has emerged over the past ten years in our organizations to be the opposite of the injunction to " 0 defects ", a pillar of the quality approach stemming from the Toyotism of the 1980s.

The idea of " right to..."  error highlights that the freedom to make mistakes is not self-evident in our society, whereas logically it should : " Errare humanum est " taught us Seneca. And by definition, humans are incompatible with perfection.

Punishment : whoever gets a slap on the wrist won't do it again...

The performance evaluation criteria, as practiced in the control-validation system that we know, track down the breach more than they encourage initiative. These criteria stem from promotion on merit, which was first introduced in the school environment after the French Revolution with the definition of " bonélévitude " as explained in the 1970s by the didactician Jean Repusseau. Then educational qualifications carry out their conversion action, transforming aristocratic privileges into meritocratic privileges (the only ones accepted in a democratic society) to legitimize social reproduction (see Bourdieu and Passeron).

The corollary of promotion is punishment : we find the idea of the " bad student " relegated to the corner of the classroom with his donkey's cap. Punishment is reputed to be educational, as a means of making the individual responsible, as the philosopher Marcel Conche pointed out in 2003 in The Foundation of Morality : " if the child must be punished, it is only to the extent that the action of punishing can be integrated into the work of education ".

In his famous Émile (or On Education) of 1762,  Jean-Jacques Rousseau promoted the idea of immanent punishment: to " guarantee the heart from vice and the mind from error ", it was a question, according to the philosopher, of " never inflicting punishment on children as punishment, but that it should always come to them as a natural consequence of their bad action."  not punishing others for lying, but making sure that the bad effects of lying, such as no longer being believed when telling the truth, have a deterrent effect.

The duplication of the educational principle of punishment in the managerial relationship is nevertheless infantilizing and can be counterproductive. Not only is there a risk that punishment will be misused in its application to justify the banning of people who are wanted to be rid of for illegitimate and/or unfounded reasons, but it can, just as dangerously, induce the internalization of an impossibility of acting, a source of self-censorship.

No fail, no gain !

And this is the source of the problem : while organizations are becoming aware of the importance of " thinking alongside ", beyond the framework imposed on us, error is a sine qua non condition for creativity and innovation. As Albert Einstein said : " A person who has never been wrong is a person who has never tried anything new ".

So the mistake would be desirable ? In an approach other than the control/validation/sanction route, error is indeed a great source of learning. Because allowing errors does not mean absolving responsibility: in the logic of Test & Learn, errors are prolific as long as we look at the reasons that led us to go the wrong way. Edgar Morin says it well : " Error can be fruitful on the condition that it is recognized, that its origin and cause are elucidated in order to eliminate its recurrence ." Error thus becomes wealth, and continuous improvement...

Promoting the right to make mistakes : some best practices

But how do you deal with the tension between error and risk ? How can we encourage individuals to try, even if it means making mistakes, without absolving them of responsibility? And how can we value performance and success without creating too strong a feeling of guilt in the event of failure ?  Here are a few ways to help you think :

• At the organizational level, the promotion of the right to make mistakes is based on the evolution of the framework : a balance must be found to allow people to go off the slopes while providing safety nets for their employees. Risk-taking must not become endangered in any way, for the members of the organization or for its ecosystem : this therefore requires the implementation of a preventive risk assessment approach, both on a technical and human level. The consequence of the error should also be thought out: it is not necessarily a question of abolishing the sanction, but of rethinking it. Error is rarely attributable to a single individual : it is appropriate to redefine it collectively and constructively, in a relational charter for example.

• At the managerial level, the best way to value the right to make mistakes is based on exemplarity. Acknowledging your own mistakes to your teams by talking about them freely is to help break the taboo and show that we too can make mistakes, and that it's " ok ". It is also a sign of humility and wisdom : Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote : "A man should never be ashamed to admit that he is wrong, because by making this confession, he proves that he is wiser today than yesterday ".  Not trying to identify someone responsible in the event of a failure is to consider that the responsibility is shared and this allows us to focus instead on ways to improve.

Processes can also be systematized to allow learning, such as RETEX and other constructive feedback. An internal communication channel can be set up to share with your team your mistakes and what you have learned from them: there is nothing to prevent you from taking advantage of the mistakes of others ! Workshops, seminars and/or training can be offered to raise awareness of the subject and promote the free expression of all with a preventive aim, where everyone can calmly address the fears that drive them and the means to remedy them. You can also set up moments dedicated to celebrating your failures : a lost commercial negotiation = an opportunity to get together as a collective in a moment (why not festive) to de-dramatize the failure and recognize the efforts invested.