To Fail Is To Learn

...Or so we are told at school. It would also seem, in my experience, that the difficulties children have in understanding that learning from one's mistakes is part of the overall learning and performance improvement process, continues into adulthood. There is nothing untoward about the predisposition to want to avoid failure. It is hard wired into humans following millions of years of evolution. You would have thought that we would have become more adept at looking at the underlying reasons behind mistakes so as to avoid them in the future.

To be fair, some industries have become better at doing this. Take the aviation industry where mistakes can cost lives and have devastating effects on the business as a whole as a result. It is usually the human element, often comprising a chain of small human errors, which leads to catastrophic disasters.