Develop a Positive Error Culture to Drive Team Success

Goals & Target Audience
Mistakes are inevitable, but how they are managed determines team success. In today’s fast-paced and complex world, a strong error culture is a competitive advantage. This seminar equips leaders with the tools to build a culture of learning and innovation in VUCA, BANI, or VOPA environments.

Key Benefits:
In this workshop, your team will learn to embrace mistakes as opportunities for growth:

  • Growth through mistakes: Discover how you and your team can turn errors into opportunities for improvement.
  • Strategic development: Learn the “dinosaur principle” to identify false success and create strategies to address it.
  • Decision-making tools: Use techniques to analyze scenarios, assess risks, and make informed decisions.

Target Group
This seminar is designed for managers, team leaders, project leaders, and HR professionals aiming to implement a positive error culture within their organization. No prior experience with error culture is required.

Seminar Contents
We cover corporate-specific needs and these key topics:

  • The role of errors in driving innovation
  • Introduction to the “dinosaur principle” to prevent misguided developments
  • Use of tools like pre-mortem to identify project risks
  • Practical exercises for building a constructive error culture
  • Free e-book the psychology of entrepreneurship (in German) and  workbook

The Dinosaur Principle is a methodology that makes people realize that sometimes what feels like success can be the way to failure. By learning how to cope with the uncertainty that leaving the comfort zone brings, we prevent ourselves from failure out of blindness and embark on a journey to long-term personal growth.

In this workshop we learn tools that help to cope with mistakes and failure as individuals and teams. We look at what would be the bottom of the learning curve by analyzing what keeps us personally growing and what gives us energy. Since this particular motivator is something different of everyone of us, there are various approaches presented in our Workshops.

“Assumptions that do not associate with probabilities create a false sense of certainty. The Premortem technique raises awareness of possibilities, including their likely consequences, to enrich planning.” Gary Klein

Pre-mortem is a technique of working backward by considering alternatives that emerge from failure assumptions from all members, contributors or collaborators of a project. It broadens the scope of scenarios examined and can include key factors.

Decision makers are enabled to gain input from project members that otherwise often remain untapped but can be of key relevance.
Unlike a post-mortem, the project is dissected into several aspects before it has actually started. Ideally a project kick-off has already taken place and the general project plan is available, but in a very early stage.

Facts

Size:

  • 6 – 12 People
  • Ideally the complete project team (not only project managers or decision makers)

Duration

  • Briefing
  • 90-120 Minutes Workshop
  • Debriefing, Follow-up Workshop

Format:

  • In-house Workshop for corporate projects
  • Projects between 2 companies / independent parties

This agile method offers key advantages in comparison to other approaches, by allowing real criticism on a factual level and using the natural human tendency to overlook critical aspects. It’s known to reduce overconfidence more than any of the other critiquing approaches.

One criticism that this method sometimes gets is that it may lead to a negative, pessimistic mood in the team. It is a fair concern and depending on the corporate culture can be an issue. However, we believe that, correctly applied and in the right context, the advantages outweigh that it can help identify fears that are otherwise not addressed and prevent overconfidence bias in teams.

While not official part of a pre-mortem, at SEABRAND we have made great experiences by blending this type of workshop with a playful kick-off such as Lego Serious Play ® LSP ®.

Alternatively, or in addition to the pre-mortem method, we also recommend de Bono’s six thinking hats method, i.e. to deeper elaborate on regulatory or structural aspects.

More information

Would you like to learn more about this method and how it can improve your team performance? I look forward to speaking to you!