Mistakes Happen: How Do You Move Forward Professionally?

We’ve all made mistakes at work — missed a deadline, sent an email to the wrong person, or overlooked a crucial step. The question becomes, what now?

While the mistake itself can’t be undone, responding thoughtfully is key.

Mistakes range in scale and severity. It could be an incident between two colleagues, isolated to a specific department, or a university-wide issue affecting a large number of students. While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for professional mistakes (and the scope of the mistake will impact the measures you take), the following offers a possible roadmap.

Note: After a professional mistake or failure, you may feel pressured to respond quickly, yet pausing to reflect on what happened and its impact helps you gain the clarity needed to respond effectively.

Pause, Regroup, and Assess the Type of Failure

It’s hard to make corrections when you’re still flustered, panicked, or disappointed with yourself. Take a moment to collect yourself and remember that mistakes happen to everyone.

Once you’ve regained your composure, it’s important to identify the nature of the failure you’re dealing with. Your approach will likely differ depending on whether it was a simple oversight with minimal impacts or a more complex situation that resulted in a bigger issue. Amy Edmondson, in her book “Right Kind of Wrong,” identifies three common types of failure:

1) Basic failures are simple, preventable errors that happen when we overlook information or fail to follow known procedures.

Example: A staff member mistypes a classroom’s capacity, allowing too many students to register. A quick double-check could have prevented the mistake.

2) Complex failures are mistakes that arise from “the perfect storm” of factors; there’s no single cause, but rather multiple factors and people involved.

Example: Last-minute room changes for several high-demand courses conflict with labs, lectures, or faculty availability, but unfortunately, the system doesn’t catch all conflicts. This “perfect storm” of last-minute changes and a system error causes widespread registration issues for students, which must now be resolved manually.

3) Intelligent failures occur in uncertain contexts when you’re testing new approaches or seeking new knowledge. These are the “right kind of wrong” because they generate learning.

Example: The university tests out a new scheduling model with a small set of courses. While there is some confusion, the experiment helps the registrar plan a better approach before making larger changes.

Understanding the type of failure/mistake can guide you on the type of response warranted and what actions to take next. While we often hear advice to “fail fast, fail often,” and “embrace failure,” Edmonson warns that this advice lacks important nuance. “Basic failures are not the right kind of wrong,” she wrote in her book. “[They] are unproductive — wasting time, energy, and resources.”

Basic failures can (and should) be prevented through checklists and clear procedures, whereas complex and intelligent failures offer opportunities to learn, adjust systems, and innovate.

With a clearer understanding of the type of failure, you can now evaluate its impact.

Assess the Impact

Before you can make a plan to correct your mistake, it’s important to understand the full scope. Consider who or what the mistake impacted directly (and any possible ripple effects) so you can determine the necessary corrective actions.

“A clear-eyed assessment is really important to how you move past [mistakes or failures],” says Sally Anne Carroll, founder of Whole Life Strategies Coaching.

She encourages professionals to consider:

What was within my control (or ours, if a group effort)? What was not? What assumptions might I have made, and were they correct, or was something missed or unknowable? No one is perfect: mistakes get made, failures happen. So what story am I attaching to this mistake or failure, and how is that impacting me?

Pro tip: Mapping out the ripple effects in a table can be particularly helpful for creating a clear plan of action and demonstrates careful consideration to leadership.

Brainstorm Possible Solutions

Think strategically about what needs to be done. You may not be able to resolve the issue on your own, particularly if it affects the broader campus community, but brainstorming and presenting possible solutions will demonstrate your goodwill toward your manager, colleagues, and the affected parties — and illustrate that you are taking accountability.

Remember that you can implement a short-term fix if needed, until the longer-term fix is possible.

Communicate Thoughtfully and Early

Think through how you’ll communicate with others about the mistake, particularly leadership and anyone affected by the error. When doing so, it’s often helpful to use the following structure: 1) what happened, 2) what you can do (or are doing) about it, 3) how you’ll avoid this same error in the future.

Note: It’s important to communicate early and often, particularly if the error requires immediate action. While it’s helpful to brainstorm possible solutions as mentioned above, make sure you do so promptly. It’s better to acknowledge an error and let others know a plan is being developed than to delay action, which could compound the problem. Early communication also invites colleagues and leaders to help resolve the issue — sometimes two heads are better than one!

Even a simple statement like “I recognize there’s an issue here, and I’m exploring options to address it” signals accountability while buying time to devise a plan.

Reflect and Learn

Once the mistake has been corrected, reflect on what went wrong and identify systems to prevent similar errors.

Were you tired, stressed, or in a hurry? Those could all cause a basic failure or contribute to a complex failure.

As Edmonson says, “To err is human. And to forgive (ourselves, especially) is indeed divine. But adopting simple practices to prevent basic failures in our lives and organizations is both possible and worthwhile.”

We all make mistakes in our careers. Resist your initial gut reaction of shame — but do hold yourself accountable, make corrections, and learn from these instances.

Different types of failures call for different reflections and prevention techniques:

Basic failures often happen in familiar contexts when we are overconfident, inattentive, or skipping steps. Checklists and other prevention systems can help us slow down and follow protocol. Complex failures, on the other hand, arise from multiple interacting factors, so reflection should consider the broader system or process issues that contributed to the problem. Intelligent failures, though frustrating, are often the most valuable. They occur in uncertain contexts as part of testing or experimenting and can guide learning and improvement. Edmondson highlights, for example, how several failed surgeries ultimately led to the successful invention of open-heart surgery. If your mistake falls into this category, embrace it as part of the journey — use what you’ve learned to inform your next experiment and continue building knowledge.

Pro tip: Keep a failure log — for yourself or your team/institution. Tracking a few simple things (what happened, type of failure, and takeaways) helps you build a repository of data to help you spot patterns and areas for improvement.

Closing Thoughts

Carroll notes that it’s natural to have a range of emotions throughout the process of recovering from a mistake.

“It’s important to bring non-judgment, self-compassion, and grace to the party,” she said. “[This] can be the real differentiator in [fostering] useful reflection and learning that helps us to go beyond just rectifying a mistake to integrating real growth, learning, and generativity from those times when it all goes wrong.”

Adopting the right mindset is key because, as Edmondson reminds us, “errors will always be with us.” The key is to own your mistakes, learn from them, and keep moving forward. For both individual and institutional growth, success comes from minimizing preventable errors and focusing on the right kind of wrong — intelligent failures, which can be a powerful teacher and a driver of improvement and innovation.