An important sales demonstration crashes, a large complex print job gets ruined in finishing, you deliver the huge printed RFQ response binders to the wrong customer who happens to be your customer's direct competitor (I did this once), you sent a 2 million person e-mail campaign out with the wrong (much lower price) offer on it; I don't mean to bring up bad memories but we've all been there. Mistakes happen; they will not only continue to happen but potentially more often, due to the increasing rates of change and complexity, and our growing habit of giving three jobs to a single person. If you need any convincing, check out the latest state of the internet slides from Mary Meeker.

We have a choice how we respond to mistakes, it's so important and it's one of the places that I feel clearly differentiates the new digital economy. Silicon Valley startups worship the mistake or failure, there is actually a term called "fail-fast." When startups change their strategy because they've realized that their current direction (the one their funding was based on) is wrong, they don't call it a mistake, they call it a pivot. We tried, we experimented, we learned, we came to a conclusion that sets us out on a different path. Last week at The Lean Startup Conference Marc Andreessen talked about several things he tried and failed at before he decided to build on the browser idea which eventually became Netscape. He said that back then, "pivots were called fu** ups."

So the startup world embraces failure as a path to learning. This is a long way away from the culture of most organizations where mistakes are treated as a moral failure; the reaction is best described by Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate. "…search for villains, elevation of accusers, and mobilization of authority to mete out punishment…" When we react to mistakes with a moral mindset we create a "state of shame". Charles Darwin, in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, described the shame affect as consisting of blushing, confusion of mind, downward cast eyes, slack posture, and lowered head, and he noted observations of shame affect in human populations worldwide. What do you think your chances are of overall improvement and, specifically, preventing mistakes in the future, when you put your people into a "state of shame"?

What I find surprising in most organizational settings is that, not only are mistakes reacted to within a moral mindset but most often there is no real post-mortem. Because everyone is in a state of shame, nobody wants to talk about it. Everyone goes back to working as they were, nothing gained from the incredible learning opportunity and everything lost in the building of a culture of fear. How do you know you're organization is in a "shame state?" Look for what shame feeds on according to Brené Brown; secrecy, silence, and judgment.

There is an alternative to the moral mindset response to mistakes which creates an opportunity not only prevent the same mistakes from happening in the future, but can actually create a culture where your people are more creative, innovative, and accepting of change. What if next time something goes terribly wrong, rather than turning to blame, which Brené Brown defines as "a way to discharge pain and discomfort" in her now famous TED Talks, you view the mistake as an invaluable learning opportunity?

There is an alternative to the moral mindset response to mistakes which puts you in a situation to not only prevent the same mistakes from happening in the future, but can actually create a culture where your people are more creative, innovative, and accepting of change.

How do you get out of the moral mindset and into an environment where people will be comfortable being vulnerable? Yes, vulnerable. It's not a common term used in corporate America but that's what it takes to have an open and honest conversation about what went wrong. Guess what creating an environment where people feel safe being vulnerable leads to? Brené Brown says, "Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change and vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage."

During his presentation at The Lean Startup Conference, Dan Milstein suggested you use humor as the tool because that's what humor is "something that stretches or breaks the mental frame that people are using to interpret a situation." Once you break that frame, you point people towards an economic mindset as the alternative way to evaluate the situation. The situation is serious, otherwise it wouldn't warrant a post-mortem. But we tend to exaggerate and overreact to the true seriousness so story telling can help everyone see the event on a continuum. Telling your failure story invokes empathy and lucky you, empathy is the antidote to shame (Brené Brown.) Humor and failure stories can be combined to both get your people into a state that releases them from their fear and puts the event in perspective.

Once you're in the economic mindset, there is a process that can help you through a post-mortem. It's called the Five Whys, and it was created by Taiichi Ohno, Co-inventor of the Toyota Production System (TPS). You essentially identify what went wrong and you ask "why?" five times to get to the root of the problem. When you get to the roots, you make a proportional investment in corrective action at every level of the analysis. The problem needs to be specific, e.g. "users couldn't login to the site" or "shipment got sent to the wrong address."

A very typical response during a Five Whys post-mortem is the "I did something stupid, I know it, and I won't do it again." Dan Milstein debunks this as "Hindsight Bias", easy to see errors after the fact, very difficult in the moment. He uses humor to help us understand the idea, "let's plan for a future where we're as stupid as we are today." The post-mortem is about creating "…a system which is resilient to occasional bouts of really intense stupidity."

Mistakes will happen, you can count on that. Your reaction to them is a choice, a very important choice between shame and courage. In the face of the tectonic changes happening in the print industry I would say we could use a lot more courage and a lot less shame.