Dr. Brian Goldman is not afraid of making mistakes. In fact, he embraces failure.
During a Wednesday evening panel, "Everyone Makes Mistakes: Transforming our Failures into Professional Success," Goldman, an ER physician at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, and Duke faculty members Catherine Admay, Sim Sitkin and L. Gregory Jones discussed the stigmas against making mistakes in academia and professional life -- and how mistakes can make you better.
The panel was organized by the Duke Colloquium and moderated by Peter Ubel, a Duke professor of marketing and public policy who is also a medical doctor. The Colloquium's three-day "Series IV: Rethinking Professional Success," also included a keynote lecture Tuesday night and a lunch seminar on Thursday.
After Goldman shared an anecdote about a patient who died as a result of several doctors' negligence, including his own, the other panelists weighed in on how to cope constructively with such failures. Fuqua School of Business professor Sim Sitkin said expecting individuals to perform perfectly in the workplace is "unrealistic."
"In schools and organizations, we treat actions as either a mistake or not a mistake without any degrees of variation," Sitkin said. "It's not about making the mistakes. It's about what comes after."
Theologian L. Gregory Jones, the former dean of Duke's Divinity School, added that the inability to see "gray areas" forces individuals to hide their mistakes, which can lead to more errors in the future.
"We've lost the language of forgiveness," Jones said. "We live in a system that doesn't encourage us to learn from our mistakes because we are made to feel alone whenever we commit an error. Team-based learning would help create a culture of relationships."
The panelists agreed that organizations needed to be restructured to allow young employees to make and learn from mistakes early so they would not fail catastrophically later on. Addressing the undergraduate students in the audience, Jones said finding mentors who are forthright about their past errors will help young professionals feel more comfortable admitting their shortcomings and create a more trusting, collaborative workplace.
Third-year student Ani Saraswathula, a Duke Colloquium student director, hopes the talk will encourage students to work together to overcome feelings of shame rooted in Duke's culture of perfectionism.
"Students at Duke now feel like they can't admit their failures because when they look at other students they only see their glowing successes,"Saraswathula said. "But we have to be aware that this issue of not [admitting failure] will not go away after we graduate, and it isn’t limited to certain professions. These mistakes come up time and again, across professions, and it's an inherently human thing that we have to deal with."
For more information about the Duke Colloquium and upcoming events, visit the Duke Colloquium website.