Watch the recording of the webinar (in English):
View and download the slides:
Listen to the recordings via our podcast -- The webinar, then the Q&A
A brief transparency note before we begin: this webinar, which is about learning from mistakes, was itself interrupted by a series of mistakes. A contractor showed up unannounced mid-presentation. The Q&A session was knocked offline by technical problems. Mark had to step away from his own webinar to answer the door. He left all of it in the recording rather than editing it out, because editing your mistakes out of a presentation about learning from mistakes would miss the point entirely.
That's the spirit of the whole session.
Mark Graban started the My Favorite Mistake podcast roughly two years before this webinar with a simple, unusual question for guests from diverse backgrounds and industries: thinking about your career or your professional life, what's your favorite mistake? Not your biggest mistake. Not your most embarrassing one. Your favorite -- one that led to learning, drove you to improve, or unexpectedly produced something good.
By the time he gave this talk, he'd asked that question of roughly 180 people, including an NFL coaching trailblazer, a Shark Tank investor, a zoologist who got his hand bitten by a crocodile, a former CIA operative turned congressman, and multiple people who spent decades inside Toyota. The patterns that emerged became the foundation for this session -- and eventually for his book The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation.
What follows is the substance of the session, organized so the page is useful whether you watched it or are landing here from search.
The framing trips people up at first. Greg Cody, a longtime sports columnist for the Miami Herald, described it as an oxymoron when Mark posed the question to him. Why would you cherish a mistake?
But the framing is deliberate. A favorite mistake is different from your biggest mistake or your most painful one. It's one that stuck -- one you still think about, one that drove you to change something real about how you work. A favorite mistake is typically one or more of these:
Something that led to learning that helped your career or your organization. Something you've genuinely worked to avoid repeating. Or sometimes, something that produced an unexpected positive outcome.
That last category is where the crocodile comes in.
Ron McGill is a zoologist at Zoo Miami. Early in his career, by his own account, he was cocky and careless and got his right hand badly bitten while working with a crocodile. He ended up in the hospital. One of the nurses caring for him became his wife. He considers the crocodile incident his favorite mistake.
Mark's own example from this category: taking a job at Dell Computer in Austin in 1999 that wasn't the right fit. He lasted less than two years. But while there, he met his wife. Twenty-plus years of marriage and counting. He doesn't consider the marriage a mistake -- he considers taking the job his favorite one.
These aren't the most instructive stories for organizational learning, but they illustrate that the question opens people up. It gets at something true about how mistakes work in real lives and real careers.
The favorite mistakes worth spending more time on are the workplace kind -- the ones where something went wrong, someone responded constructively, and real learning happened as a result.
Kevin Harrington was one of the original Sharks on Shark Tank and the inventor of the modern infomercial format. When Mark asked him this question, Harrington described a period when his business was generating roughly two million dollars per week in revenue. One of his twelve products had a serious defect problem. Customer chargebacks on that one product were flowing through the same merchant bank account as all twelve -- and the bank cut off the flow of money for everything. The survival of the business was at risk.
Harrington didn't blame anyone else for this. He took responsibility. He set up separate bank accounts for each product so no single product's problems could threaten everything else. His reflection: it was fortunate that this mistake happened at a scale where he could absorb it and learn from it. The same structural flaw at a larger scale would have been catastrophic. He fixed it when fixing it was survivable.
Will Hurd -- a former CIA operative who was later elected to Congress from Texas -- told a different kind of story. In his first run for office in 2010, he won the Republican primary with the most votes but not a majority, which under Texas rules meant a runoff against the second-place candidate. His consultants told him a runoff required a different strategy. He ignored them, reasoning that the strategy that had produced the most votes in the primary was obviously working. He lost the runoff. He later acknowledged clearly: that was his mistake, not his consultants'. He ran again in 2014 and won, then won reelection in 2016 and 2018.
Mark's takeaway: both stories illustrate something about how successful people actually use mistakes. They don't pretend mistakes didn't happen. They don't deflect blame onto someone else. They name the mistake, own it, learn from it, and adjust. He ran a LinkedIn poll asking whether highly successful people are successful because they make fewer mistakes, the same number but learn better from them, or more mistakes with more resulting learning. Forty-nine percent of respondents chose the third option. A combined 87% disagreed with "successful because they made fewer mistakes."
Mark has spent significant time learning from Toyota veterans, and the contrast between Toyota's culture and the default organizational response to mistakes is the core argument of the session.
Isao Yoshino joined Toyota in 1966. He was in the paint shop during a four-month orientation, tasked with adding paint and solvent to a tank. He grabbed the wrong container. One hundred cars had to be reworked. The response he received: nobody blamed him. His leaders said this is our mistake, because we didn't give you the detailed instructions you needed to do this correctly. They focused on the process that had made the mistake possible. They worked to prevent the same failure from recurring.
Yoshino described this experience when Mark interviewed him for the podcast. Katie Anderson, who wrote the book about Yoshino's career at Toyota, drew the through-line: the only secret to Toyota is its attitude toward learning. A people-centered culture. A culture of looking at process rather than just outcome.
David Meier, a former Toyota plant president and co-author with Jeff Liker on two books in the Toyota Way series, offered a similar framing. He said Toyota operates on what he called a no-fault, no-blame culture. He acknowledged that clearing the blame impulse from his own thinking took a couple of years. The instinct to find fault and place blame is deeply conditioned in most of us -- by schooling, by organizational culture, by a lifetime of watching how mistakes typically get handled. It doesn't disappear because someone says you should stop doing it. It takes time and consistent modeling to actually change.
When he was plant president, his plant manager would ask: what have we learned today? Not what went wrong. What did we learn?
The session isn't just about individual famous mistakes. It's about the organizational conditions that allow learning from mistakes to happen -- or prevent it.
Dr. David Mayer, who spent his career in patient safety advocacy, told a story from his residency as an anesthesiologist. A surgeon cut into the wrong side of a patient. That was the surgeon's mistake. The surgeon's second mistake was lying to the patient, claiming they'd found problems on both sides and performed two procedures. Mayer's own reflection: his mistake was not speaking up, not telling the patient the truth, not challenging what he knew was wrong. His reason: the culture was hierarchical and punitive in ways that would have made speaking up dangerous for a young resident's career.
That experience ignited a lifelong passion for patient safety and a career dedicated to changing healthcare culture. He cannot go back and change what happened. He can share the story in a way that might change what happens for others.
Dr. Nicole Lipkin, a psychologist and executive coach, puts it directly: you can't just tell people they should feel psychologically safe. That doesn't work any more than saying "I have an open door policy" when the first person who came through the door got yelled at. Psychological safety requires consistent leader behavior over time. You can't announce it. You have to build it.
Greg Jacobson, KaiNexus's CEO and a co-founder, was a guest on the podcast. His framing, drawing on Deming's 85/15 principle: 85% of defects or errors are caused by inadequate processes. Only 15% are true human error. That doesn't mean individuals bear no responsibility for anything. It means the default response of finding the person to blame and stopping there is wrong roughly 85% of the time.
About 15 months before this session, Mark was hosting a panel discussion moderated by Deondra Wardell. The discussion was going well -- rich conversation, strong audience engagement, running a few minutes long because there was too much good material to stop. Then the screen went dark: "This meeting has been ended by the host."
Mark was the host. He hadn't clicked anything. What happened?
The account had been shared with a KaiNexus team member who occasionally ran his own webinars. That person had scheduled and started a separate meeting on the same account, not knowing a webinar was in progress. The meeting ended.
The investigation after the fact -- focused on what happened, not who did it -- surfaced the real problem. That person wasn't just a symptom; sharing the Zoom account was the systemic condition that made the incident possible. Zoom's own support told them they shouldn't have been sharing the account.
There had actually been an earlier near-miss, a couple months before, where the same person had joined the same session as a surprise panelist, realized his error, and bailed quickly. Nobody noticed. The countermeasure agreed on at the time was that he'd just watch recordings going forward, which eliminated the chance of him joining as a panelist. But it didn't eliminate the risk of him starting a competing meeting on the same account. The near-miss had been handled, but handled at the symptom level rather than the root cause.
If the October 2020 near-miss had been traced back to the shared account and that practice had been ended, the February 2021 incident wouldn't have happened. Mark takes explicit ownership of that. The lesson: small mistakes prevented big mistakes, but only if you trace them to their actual cause and take the right action.
Deondra Wardell's response after the February incident became its own lesson. She emailed to say she was not upset, and that what happened should be classified as an opportunity for learning and improving. Mark's reflection: one thing worth doing before jumping into root cause analysis is asking someone how they're feeling. Give people space to acknowledge the mistake and recover from it before moving into problem-solving mode.
Mark has the sign on his checklist now: if working from home or anywhere with people nearby, put a sign on the door saying "webinar in progress." He didn't think that applied to him in his new home. It did. He added it to the checklist.
Lenny Walls, who played cornerback in the NFL and Canadian Football League, described being taught to have a short memory during games. If you make a mistake, the next play is coming immediately -- you can't stop and do root cause analysis on the field in front of 80,000 people. What you can do is use the time on the sideline, at halftime, after the game, and in practice the following week to reflect and improve. Failures were, in his framing, stepping stones toward winning.
The takeaway for anyone doing improvement work: there's a time for immediate response and a time for reflection, and they're not always the same moment. Getting good at knowing which is which matters.
Katie Anderson, author of Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn, offered this: if you keep dwelling on the mistake, it becomes counterproductive. Reflect, learn, adjust -- then let it go. The goal is to learn without agonizing.
Matt Boos, who spent his career in sales and consulting, described a mistake he says he thinks about probably every day: a time early in his career when he was behind on a project and didn't go to his boss for help until it was too late. His boss's response was not to blame him for being behind but to point out that he could have helped much earlier if Matt had come to him sooner. That distinction -- between punishing the mistake and expressing that help was available and withheld -- shaped how Matt thought about his own role as a leader for the rest of his career.
One of Mark's favorite examples in the session comes from a distillery about an hour west of Austin called Garrison Brothers. The founder, Dan Garrison, and master distiller Donnis Todd both appeared on the podcast.
Donnis had over-aged a batch of bourbon. His hypothesis was that bourbon keeps improving the longer you age it -- true up to a point, but he went past it. Thousands of dollars of whiskey had to be discarded. Dan didn't fire him. Dan emphasized the learning. As Donnis put it: Dan has always been willing to give me the time to learn from my mistakes.
Workers at Garrison Brothers sign their names to the wall near where mistakes were made. It's a way of owning up -- and a way of marking that a mistake happened, was acknowledged, was learned from, and can be talked about. It's also, as Donnis noted, something that happens to your character when you own up to mistakes in an environment where owning up is safe.
That's the summary of everything the session is working toward: creating environments where owning up is safe, where the response to a mistake is learning rather than blame, and where the accumulated learning from many mistakes over time produces organizations that actually get better.
A few direct connections to the platform.
The checklist Mark describes -- the webinar planning checklist that grew over time as new mistakes revealed new failure modes -- is a manual version of what improvement systems are designed to do automatically. Each mistake is an opportunity to update the standard, and KaiNexus is the infrastructure for capturing and tracking those updates at organizational scale.
The futility problem that Mark returns to throughout his work on psychological safety -- the fact that people stop surfacing mistakes not because they're afraid of punishment but because nothing happens when they do -- is directly addressed by the platform's design. Idea and issue submissions that get acknowledged, routed, and resolved create the evidence that speaking up leads to something. That evidence is what makes the behavior sustainable.
And the visibility of improvement work -- who is doing it, what was tried, what was learned -- is what makes improvement culture tangible rather than aspirational. When learning from mistakes is documented and visible, it becomes normative. Organizations that make their mistakes into institutional knowledge rather than things to be forgotten or denied are the organizations that compound their learning over time.
Mark Graban is a Senior Advisor at KaiNexus and an internationally recognized author, speaker, consultant, and podcaster. He is the host of the My Favorite Mistake podcast, which has featured conversations with more than 180 guests, and the author of The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation, as well as Lean Hospitals, Measures of Success, and other books. He has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of lean thinking, continuous improvement, and respectful leadership across healthcare, manufacturing, and technology.
What is a "favorite mistake" and why is the question framed that way?
A favorite mistake isn't necessarily your biggest or most painful mistake -- it's one that stuck with you, drove real learning, changed how you work, or unexpectedly produced something positive. The framing is deliberate: asking about your "biggest" mistake tends to invite either depressing stories or defensive deflection. Asking about a favorite creates space for honest reflection and the kind of thinking that actually leads somewhere useful.
Why do successful people tend to talk openly about their mistakes?
Mark's observation across 180+ podcast conversations: successful people generally don't succeed by making fewer mistakes. They succeed by learning from them and adjusting. Kevin Harrington structured his business differently after a near-catastrophic oversight. Will Hurd lost an election, named his own mistake clearly, and came back to win the next one. In a LinkedIn poll, 87% of respondents disagreed with the idea that successful people make fewer mistakes -- most believe they make the same number or more, with better learning.
What does Toyota's approach to mistakes look like in practice?
When Isao Yoshino put the wrong solvent into a paint tank in 1966, causing 100 cars to need reworking, his managers' response was: this is our mistake, because we didn't give you adequate instructions. The investigation focused on what in the process allowed the mistake to occur, not on finding someone to blame. David Meier, a former Toyota plant president, described the norm as a no-fault, no-blame culture where the plant manager would regularly ask "what did we learn today?" Neither of these outcomes happens automatically. They're the product of deliberate and sustained leader behavior over time.
What's the difference between a near-miss and a learning opportunity?
Only what you do with it. Mark's Zoom account story illustrates a near-miss that was handled at the symptom level rather than the root cause level -- the immediate problem was fixed, but the underlying condition that made the problem possible wasn't addressed. Months later, the same underlying condition produced a much more visible incident. Near-misses are often more valuable than incidents because you can learn from them without the full cost of the failure. But only if you trace them to their actual cause.
Can you build a culture where people feel safe admitting mistakes?
Yes, but not by declaring it. Dr. Nicole Lipkin's observation: telling people they should feel psychologically safe doesn't work, any more than saying "I have an open door policy" when people have learned through experience that using the open door leads to punishment. Safety is built through consistent leader behavior -- modeling vulnerability, responding constructively when people surface problems, and rewarding honesty rather than punishing it. It takes time and repetition. It can't be announced into existence.
How does learning from mistakes connect to continuous improvement?
Directly. Most waste and most defects have systemic causes -- processes that make errors easy or inevitable. When people surface mistakes honestly, they provide the data needed to find and fix those systemic causes. When organizations punish mistakes or create conditions where people hide them, the systemic causes stay in place and the same mistakes recur. CI cultures that sustain themselves are cultures where mistakes are treated as the information source for improvement, not as evidence of individual failure.
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