Culture of Error Management “Why Admit an Error When No One Will Find Out?”

Abstract

What has a Stradivari and Linux in common? It is the error culture-driven process that created it. A culture of restless strives for innovation and quality enabling continuous learning. We systematically get trained by being punished as child when doing mistakes and often need a life long cumbersome process to undo this conditioning. In western world many organization behave just like as that: errors are socially not acceptable. This seems to be universal applicable as Kaizen and the “zero-defect-culture” can teach us. It is not a society intrinsic attitude - as one can observe from the Toyota way - which took years to establish an organizational error management culture. Studies in Europe show too that organizational error management are a means to boost companies’ performance and goals achievement. Hence, what can we learn from Stradivari and Linux? It is the way to organize error management and innovation. This is key to open source projects and the raising inner source projects as observable in companies like Google.