Mistake Culture - confirmation without even looking

It was not more than two days ago that OFD shared its perspective on the value and place that mistakes can have in learning and creativity. We lamented how closed our society is to making mistakes, how ingrained it is in our cultural mindset that making mistakes is singular a 'bad' thing.

The folks at OFD could not prevent ourselves smiling at the irony of having this confirmed the next day in two separate parts of the same paper, the print version of the LA Times on Thursday January 24th, 2008.

The first is courtesy of the Cal State System's Chancellor. His belief reinforces the popularly held misconception that mistakes should ideally occur infrequently, underscoring the idea that they are something to be avoided.

"I make a few mistakes once in a while. But I try to fix them and not make them again." Charles Reed

The second one comes from an interview with the Music Director of the New York Philharmonic who also speaks to the idea of mistakes as something to be avoided.

"The carnage brought about by conflict resulting in war is too horrendous to consider, and yet human beings are almost incapable of learning from their mistakes we made in the past, and go on repeating them." Lorin Maazel

As the context of Maazel's commentary attests, there are situations in which making mistakes are unequivocally a bad thing. There is clearly a place for a desire to avoid repetition to be attached to the concept of mistake. The issue we at OFD have however is that this currently too firmly and exclusively anchors the popularly held conception of what a 'mistake' is.

Here's how OFD envisions the dimensions of mistake. It's not meant to be definitive, just a starting point for discussion, development and, we hope, change in the perceived value of mistakes.

Think different?

Field research this week took the form of exploring the content of fridges belonging to a random sample of people willing to allow OFD researchers to look inside without a warrant.

We made an alarming discovery, particularly regarding condiments. There was an incredibly high occurence not only of same kinds of condiments, but brands too.

It got us hungry and got us thinking. About not thinking.

This is exactly the problem in the marketing, branding and advertising world today. Everybody's reading the same thing. The same blogs. The same books. Recommended by the same sources. No wonder there is a dearth of creativity across our fields. We've not dumbed ourselves down, we've numbed ourselves through collective consensus exposure.

We've been too willing to idolatrize writers like Russel Davis, Malcolm Gladwell, David Droga. The sycophantic agreement needs to stop and more discriminating thinking needs to begin. But it won't happen when we're all reading the same material.

Participation culture expects more than merely voicing opinions on others people's opinions. It means coming up with you own thinking. Original ideas. Are you up for it?