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Aug 12, 2026
007 · The Best Don't Make Fewer Mistakes
007 · The Best Don't Make Fewer Mistakes
00:00
14:32
Transcript
0:00
This is Harvest the Signal, where the smallest signals can change the biggest systems. And now here's your host, Jodi Lynn Owen. What is the system trying to teach us?
0:12
That's the question behind every field note, and this week's is: the best don't make fewer mistakes, they waste fewer. I'm Jodi Lynn Owen, and this is Harvest the Signal.
0:25
So as usual, I'm going to start with a story, and you may have heard this story before, but stick with me because it's the second part of the story that I really wanna dive into, and I hope you'll gain as much from it as I have thinking about it.
0:41
So in 1942, Britain was losing a war it could not even see. German U-boats were sinking Allied ships across the Atlantic faster than shipyards could replace them.
0:56
So they sent destroyers with these convoys to protect them, but the submarines still slipped inside the escort screen and picked off ship after ship.
1:07
Every convoy commander had experience and every captain had a theory, but none of them had an answer. So the Royal Navy tried something that looked nothing like fighting a war.
1:19
Instead of sending another ship to sea, it painted a large grid on the floor of a room in Liverpool.
1:26
This was the Western Approaches Tactical Unit set up at a place called Derby House in Liverpool under a captain named Gilbert Roberts, and it was staffed largely by young women from the Women's Royal Navy Service, known as the Wrens, which is why I originally loved this story 'cause it was a really great involvement of women in the war effort in an untraditional way.
1:52
Escort officers walked the grid on foot while the Wrens moved model ships and submarines by hand. Every move stood for two minutes of a real battle.
2:03
Convoys that had already been attacked were rebuilt piece by piece slowly until the room could finally answer a question the scene never gave anyone time to ask: What actually happened? And patterns began to surface.
2:19
The submarine was not just appearing by magic. It was exploiting the same blind spot, the same seam in the escort screen over and over again. Once you could see it laid out on the floor, you could plan for it.
2:36
The breakthrough was important. What happened next mattered deeply. Every week, a new group of escort officers came through Liverpool. They learned the latest tactics on the grid and carried them back to sea.
2:52
Reports came back from real convoys, the simulation absorbed them, and the teaching changed. The next group left knowing a little more than the last one did.
3:02
The unit turned hard-won lessons into named tactics and taught them on repeat, so a discovery made by one crew in the Atlantic became standard practice for crews who had never met them.
3:15
Britain's advantage in that room wasn't that it suddenly had the smartest people. It was that it had built a faster learning loop. Like many World War II stories, this story has stayed with me.
3:27
We tend to misunderstand what makes an organization exceptional. We like to picture success going to the most talented team or the biggest budget or the boldest strategy, and sometimes it does.
3:40
More often, I think it goes to the organization that learns just a little faster than everyone else. So the organization that learns just a little faster than everyone else does so not because they make less mistakes.
3:57
It's because they waste fewer of the mistakes they make. Some organizations hit a problem, solve the problem, move on, and the fix dies with the moment. Others hit that same problem and do something way more deliberate.
4:11
They capture what happened, share what they learned, adjust the system where adjustments need to be made, and spare the next dozen people from repeating it.
4:23
The event itself lasts an afternoon, but the learning compounds for years. I've watched this play out across healthcare my whole career. One clinician finds a clearer way to teach a complex skill.
4:37
Another builds a workflow that catches errors before they reach a patient. Someone at the front desk changes how appointments are booked, and the no-show rate falls. Small discoveries, but real ones with huge impact.
4:52
One example I keep coming back to is from my own work. Much of our work was with refugee families, which meant that patients arrived with no prenatal records at all, not for this pregnancy and not for the ones before it.
5:07
Their prior health experiences on the other side of the world in health systems nothing like ours, in cultures nothing like ours, in family systems that moved through pregnancy very different than we move through, walked in with them and appeared nowhere on paper.
5:24
Now, the issue is that pregnancy runs on a countdown, so every week spent getting a patient onto the right path for their healthcare is a week you can never get back, and we knew we had to leverage that very first encounter in a new way.
5:39
We ran it what felt like every possible way. We changed who led it and what it covered. We folded and unfolded it. We stretched it to ninety minutes, then pulled it back to forty-five, then pushed it out again to sixty.
5:52
We split it into two. We condensed it, and we reworked it. I mean, we shook every tree in that orchard. What we finally learned was the two things that mattered most, the timing and the questions we asked.
6:08
So we stopped treating the first visit as an intake and started treating it as a launch.
6:15
Labs, screens, and an ultrasound on the same day with results that reflexed straight into treatment, monitoring, and specialist referrals instead of waiting for the next appointment.
6:27
And we rebuilt the questions themselves, crafted to draw out a full health story rather than tick off data points.
6:36
So we could take events and experiences from another country and another system and another culture and find the patterns hiding inside them.
6:46
That redesign ultimately saved lives, not because anyone worked harder, but because we found the math underneath it: time plus a rapid deployment of resources, plus a careful choreography of access, information, planning, and actions.
7:04
And to get there, we had to walk our own floors the way those officers walked the grid in Liverpool.
7:10
The patterns we needed to change were so baked into routine prenatal care that the better options weren't just hard to reach, they were hard to see at all, and harder still to build in.
7:22
The stakes were not the same, a prenatal visit format against convoys crossing the Atlantic, but the mechanism was identical, and a discovery like that is only ever as durable as the organization's memory of it.
7:37
Most improvements never leave the spot where they were born. They stay one person's trick, one person's memory, one person's spreadsheet, one person's dot phrase.
7:47
Then that person takes a new job, and the organization doesn't just lose an employee, it loses everything the employee had learned. We talk about turnover as if we're swapping one set of hands for another.
8:02
Sometimes we are erasing institutional memory and calling it a staffing change, and that is not the same kind of loss. The cost is very high. But let's go back.
8:15
The organizations that actually get better are not the ones with the fewest problems. They are the ones that are almost impossible to surprise twice with the same problem.
8:26
They notice, investigate, adjust, and then make the adjustment available to everyone who need it. The second time the problem shows up, the whole organization responds differently because the first time was not wasted.
8:41
Every organization has a learning speed. Intelligence and talents, yes, of course, but learning speed is worth some focus. You can also measure it or gain some insight into it by asking a series of questions.
8:56
How long does it take to notice something? How long before someone looks into it? How strong is the resistance to seeing what is there?
9:06
How long before the lesson reaches everyone who needs it in a way that they can apply it? How long before yesterday's discovery becomes today's standard practice? Those gaps are where cost hides.
9:21
Every unnecessary week, every time we look past or over or around or through a problem is another week spent paying for a lesson the organization already bought.
9:34
Most of us have complained about too many meetings at some point, but the idea of too many meetings misses the problem. The number of meetings is never really the question.
9:47
The real question is whether learning ever leaves that room. If the same insight gets rediscovered by five teams, you don't have five discoveries.
9:56
You have one discovery and four failures to pass it on, and a team full of people who have sat through five meetings hearing the same thing over and over again with no resolution.
10:08
The fastest improving organizations are not obsessed with collecting information. That is standard operating procedure. It's baked in for them. They are obsessed with moving it. Discovery is only half the loop.
10:21
Distribution is the other half, and it's the half most places forget. That's the real lesson of the floor at Derby House. The simulation wasn't the advantage. The weekly teaching was.
10:35
Learning had been turned into infrastructure, something the organization owned rather than something each officer had to rebuild alone. The next officer never had to start where the last one started.
10:50
Neither should the next employee.
10:53
Experience is valuable, but shared experience is what actually changes an organization, and it may be one of the most durable advantages any organization can build, not because it guarantees success, but because it lets every lesson learned once be used many times over.
11:15
Here's the question we left our Field Notes readers with: What is something your organization keeps learning over and over again because no one has built a way to remember it? One more signal, and that's your cue.
11:31
I'm about to drop something extra for the listener. Here's the one idea I want to leave sitting with you. Every organization pays tuition.
11:41
You pay it the first time a problem teaches you something, and that is unavoidable and fair and welcome even. But what isn't fair is paying it twice.
11:52
Paying again next quarter because the lesson lived in one person's head and that person went on vacation or moved on or just forgot. When I talk about infrastructure, this is what I mean.
12:05
Infrastructure is accumulated judgment. It's the hard-won lesson written down somewhere the next person can actually find and use it. It isn't glamorous.
12:17
It's a line in the chart or a checklist or taking the last five minutes of a shift to elevate any issues that came up over the course of the day.
12:27
But it's the whole difference between an organization that gets wiser and one that just gets older. So here's your one small thing before the next episode.
12:38
Think of a lesson your team has paid full price for, just one, and ask where it lives right now.
12:46
If the answer is in someone's memory, then you've just found the next piece of infrastructure worth surfacing and building where everyone can access it. And that's what Harvest the Signal is about.
13:02
Move it out of your head and into the system. That's how you stop paying tuition twice. So this is where I encourage you to noodle through these ideas while you are walking the dog or driving home.
13:15
But if you have a minute, and if today's field note changed the way you think about the way you use mistakes or even failures, please let me know. And let me know what you are up to while you're listening.
13:27
I'm genuinely curious. I do read every reply personally. In fact, the next Harvest the Signal may begin with something you've stopped accepting but haven't yet put into words.
13:39
You can connect with me on LinkedIn by my name or on threads at Harvest the Signal, and let's keep this conversation moving.
13:47
And speaking of moving, I would love to be the voice in your ear while you get where you are going. We can explore patterns hiding in plain sight together. So please hit subscribe and we'll do it again.
13:59
I'm Jody Lynn Owen. Until next time, keep looking for the signal. This has been Harvest the Signal with Jody Lynn Owen. The smallest signals can change the biggest systems.
14:14
Be sure to like, follow, and share so you never miss an episode or the opportunity to compare your field notes with your colleagues.
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