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The Mistakes That Make Us

Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation

This book is 100% completeLast updated on 2025-02-11
Mark Graban

Stop overreacting to every up and down in your metrics. Measures of Success teaches leaders how to separate meaningful signals from everyday noise using Process Behavior Charts — a simple, powerful method for driving real, sustainable improvement. Learn how to react less, lead better, and improve more.

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2025 Shingo Publication Award Recipient

What if your team’s biggest competitive advantage is the one you’ve been taught to avoid—mistakes?

In The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation, bestselling author and consultant Mark Graban shows leaders how to replace fear, blame, and silence with a culture where people learn faster, innovate more often, and continuously improve the systems around them.

Drawing from powerful stories on the My Favorite Mistake podcast (more than 200 interviews with CEOs, entrepreneurs, clinicians, creators, and change-makers), Graban reveals a consistent truth: success isn’t about avoiding mistakes—it’s about learning from them.

This practical, engaging, and deeply human book helps leaders build organizations where people speak up, take smart risks, and solve problems together. The lessons align with the principles Graban has taught for years in Lean Hospitals, Healthcare Kaizen, and Measures of Success—all grounded in respect for people, systems thinking, and psychological safety.

If you want to stop firefighting, reduce recurring problems, and spark real innovation, this book will show you how to:

  • Overcome fear-based cultures that suppress ideas, hide problems, and slow improvement
  • Build psychological safety so people feel safe admitting mistakes, raising concerns, and trying new approaches
  • Create systems that prevent errors, improve processes, and reduce blame
  • Develop a growth mindset that sees setbacks as opportunities rather than personal failures
  • Turn vulnerability into a leadership strength, not a liability
  • Accelerate learning and continuous improvement across teams and departments

You’ll learn how individuals—from startup founders to Fortune 500 executives to frontline healthcare professionals—turned their biggest missteps into turning points. And you’ll see how any team can do the same with the right leadership behaviors, habits, and systems.

Who This Book Is For

  • Leaders who want to build a culture of continuous improvement
  • Executives looking to strengthen innovation, agility, and trust
  • Managers who want teams to feel safe speaking up about problems
  • Lean practitioners and coaches seeking to reinforce respect for people
  • Anyone ready to rethink their relationship with mistakes

A Fresh, Actionable Approach to Learning from Mistakes

Mistakes are inevitable—but the quality of your response isn’t. Graban provides questions, tools, and frameworks you can use immediately to shift conversations, redesign processes, and lead in a way that improves performance and engagement.

Whether you're driving transformation, leading a team, or simply striving to grow, The Mistakes That Make Us will help you unlock the hidden value in every misstep.

Buy The Mistakes That Make Us today and start transforming mistakes into your greatest source of learning, innovation, and success.

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ManagementLeadershipLeanOrganizational PsychologyInnovation ManagementQuality ManagementStartupsLean Six SigmaNon-Fiction

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About the Author

Mark Graban

Mark Graban is an internationally recognized consultant, author, professional speaker, and podcaster. Mark is also a Senior Advisor to the technology company KaiNexus. For his full bio, visit www.MarkGraban.com.

Mark's newest book is The Silence Tax: How Lean Leaders Drive Out Fear and Futility , available now on Leanpub while in progress.

His previous book (2023). The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation, is recipient of the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award.

He is also the author of Lean Hospitals and co-author of Healthcare Kaizen, both recipients of the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award. He is the editor of the anthology Practicing Lean, published through Leanpub, and published Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More in 2018, originally on Leanpub.

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Contents

Table of Contents

    • Dedication
    • Acknowledgments
    • About the Author
    • Also by Mark Graban
    • Podcasts by Mark Graban
    • Praise for The Mistakes That Make Us
    • Introduction
      • Positively Learning from Mistakes
      • Often, It’s the Mistakes That Make Us Who We Are
      • How It Started
      • Finding a Way to Say “Yes”
      • What Makes a Mistake a Favorite?
      • Who Planted the Seed for This Book?
      • Cultivating the Culture—-What’s Ahead
    • Chapter One: Think Positively
      • What Are Mistakes?
      • Replace Punishment with Improvement
      • Fail Often—-or Learn to Succeed?
      • Discover Gaps between Expectations and Results
      • Cherish Mistakes
      • Sharing Mistakes Requires Psychological Safety
      • Shift Away from Punishment to a Positive Path
      • Identify Mistakes to Reflect, Learn, and Improve
      • Toyota’s Culture of Learning from Mistakes
      • Younger Companies Can Cultivate This Culture
    • Chapter Two: Admit Mistakes
      • Get More Comfortable Admitting Mistakes
      • Fight the Tendency to Hide Mistakes
      • Lift the Burden by Talking about Regrets and Mistakes
      • Is It Safe to Admit Your Mistakes Right Now?
      • Cultivate a Culture of Admitting Mistakes, Like Garrison Brothers
      • As a Leader, Be First to Admit Your Mistakes
      • As a Founder or CEO, Admit Your Mistakes to Help Others
      • My Unexpected Opportunity to Put the Garrison Brothers Culture to the Test
      • The Acquisition Made a Name for the Company but Included a Mistake
      • Have a Coach Point Out Mistakes You Can’t See
      • View Mistakes as an Investment, Not a Cost
      • Shift from Demanding Perfection to Learning Together
    • Chapter Three: Be Kind
      • “Kind” Is Better Than “Nice”
      • Smart People Make Mistakes
      • Learn the Science of How Our Brains React to Mistakes
      • Show Kindness When Trying Something New
      • Practice Self-Compassion, and Apologize for Your Mistakes
      • Reflect Without Dwelling on It or Beating Yourself Up
      • Get Better at Processing Failure and Mistakes
      • Apply Lessons from a Failed Business to the Next
      • Be Inspired by the Girl Who Finally Made a Mistake
      • Be Kind and Constructive: One and the Same
    • Chapter Four: Prevent Mistakes
      • Replace Fear with Mistake-Proofing
      • Is the Software Mistake-Prone or Mistake-Proof?
      • Distinguish between Planning and Execution Mistakes
      • Prevent or Quickly Fix Execution Mistakes
      • Use Checklists to Prevent Execution Mistakes
      • Prioritizing the Problems or Mistakes We Need to Prevent
      • Learn from Mistakes to Prevent Repeats
      • Checklists Help Only When You Use Them
      • The Need for Mistake-Proofing in Healthcare
      • Use Small Mistakes to Prevent Large Ones
      • Preventing Mistakes or Mitigating Their Impact
    • Chapter Five: Help Everyone to Speak Up
      • When a Surgeon Isn’t Safe to Admit a Mistake
      • Following a Slip with a Bad Decision
      • When “Never Events” Happen … All the Time
      • The Anesthesiologist’s Mistake Sparked His Patient-Safety Career
      • Model and Reward the Right Behaviors
      • Ensure It’s Actually a “Safe Space”
      • Set the Example as the Leader
      • Invite Your Leaders to Go First
      • Psychological Safety Drives Better Performance
      • Pull the “Andon Cord” to Report Problems
      • Management Change Leads to Culture Change
      • Feeling Safe to Learn from Mistakes at Toyota
      • What if Toyota Ran a Hospital?
    • Chapter Six: Choose Improvement, Not Punishment
      • Yelling at Somebody Doesn’t Make Them Less Likely to Repeat the Mistake
      • Demonstrating a More Constructive Way at KaiNexus
      • The Congressman Who Chose Learning over Punishment
      • React Well When Bad News Moves up Faster
      • Celebrate Mistakes and Learn
      • Accept Mistakes to Drive Better Performance
      • Improve Systems Instead of Blaming Individuals
      • Create Safe Opportunities to Practice and Learn
      • My Opportunity to React Well at KaiNexus
      • Innovate, and Learn from Mistakes
    • Chapter Seven: Iterate Your Way to Success
      • Replace False Certainty with Learning through Experiments
      • Test Your Ideas, and Learn
      • Be Humble, Not Stubborn
      • Don’t Just Plan and Do, Also Study and Adjust
      • Failures Are Information
      • The Therapist’s Small Test Prevented an Expensive Mistake
      • Shift from “I Know I’m Right” to “I Could Be Wrong”
      • You Can’t Have All the Answers
      • Reacting Constructively to a Mistake Was a Huge Victory for Garrison Brothers Distillery
      • Test and Iterate Like Washington Health System
      • 80% Can Be Good Enough
      • Iterate Your Understanding to Replace Assumptions with Clarity
      • Embrace Your Innovation Mistakes
    • Chapter Eight: Cultivate Forever
      • Turning a Mistake into an Experiment
      • Toyota Transplanted Seedlings to the U.S.
      • Putting David’s New Understanding to the Test
      • Share the Bounty of Your Mistakes
      • Spreading the Culture within Toyota
      • Transplanting Toyota’s Seeds into an Acquired Company
      • A Little Struggle Can Produce Better Results
      • How a Doctor Cultivates the Culture at a Software Company
      • Re-Analyzing the Soil: The Current State of Psychological Safety
      • Admit Mistakes, and Ask, “What Can We Learn?”
      • Start Cultivating, and Plan to Keep It Going
      • Keep the Pests Out
      • Start Cultivating and Experimenting
    • Afterword
      • Taking on New Challenges and Learning from Mistakes
      • Remembering to Be Positive about Mistakes
      • Finding or Starting a Better Garden for Growth
      • Iterate Your Way to Success
      • From Iteration to Completion
    • My Favorite Mistake Podcast Guests in the Book

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