Editor's Note: If you only knew what WebChief and I have been through for the past day trying to post this. Talk about issues- for some reason the computer I was using wasn't allowing my post to save (which resulted in my first version disappearing) and luckily I learned from my mistakes. As Staind sings: "Falling is easy, its the getting back up that's hard". Well, special thanks to Dave for saving my sanity. And with that...

I have often heard it said, “Love means never having to say you are sorry”. While that may be true, I find that I have to say I am sorry more often than not, as I live in a home with four women and I am significantly outnumbered. I am sorry for all kinds of things, like a few minutes ago when I threw together an excellent blog post and hit “publish”, only to find my efforts have disappeared, never to be seen again. Needless to say, this one will be done in Word; I will then cut and paste it to the editing board, because I have learned from my mistake. ‘Nuff said.

This, I find, is the crux of the matter and what my once rambling post on apologies was before vaporizing into the atmosphere. To err is human, to forgive, divine. And to make the same errors over and over and over again, well, that takes someone on a whole other level of incompetence, or just plain cluelessness. I’m not referring to the point that I am apt to screw up my daughters’ laundry on a regular basis by washing the “colds” on “hot”, or other errors of inattention when it comes to what I consider to be items on the lesser side of National Security/Life Hazard situations (although if I set the stains once more in something valuable, it may very well end up as a “life hazard” for me). But when someone perpetually insists on their infallibility, by proclaiming their organization to be the best and most modern when “operating in this decade” would be a stretch, well that’s not the trait of someone who I would want to follow.

As leaders, part of our job involves owning up to our inadequacies, evaluating the things that went wrong, and solving for the future success of our project or organization. Just last night, for example, I found that there was a good possibility that an error or omission on my part may have created a problem for the members of an organization I represent. The missing e-mail that created this situation may have been caught up in a spam filter or it may have disappeared after my recent computer crash, or it may have very well been missed among the dozens of e-mails I get daily. Whatever the cause, I felt it necessary for me to admit my possible complicity in the matter, identify the solution, and make the changes to fix the problem, which is all part of being a responsible adult and leader.

Of course, being right more often than being wrong is crucial, because if you are wrong more often than right, your credibility will not exactly garner enthusiasm when you step up to the plate. (My wife says I’m way too hard on the local weather forecasters, but if I were wrong as often as they are, I’m afraid I’d be quickly out of a job). But the situation being what it is, I also say that if you aren’t wrong from time to time, you aren’t stretching far enough out of your comfort zone to be effective, and you’re probably just following along in the pack rather than leading. Vision requires being strong enough to make observations, testing your hypotheses, and determining which will work and which will not. If Edison had not been willing enough to get back up on the horse and ride every time after he made a mistake, you might well be reading this by candlelight (is this thing on? Hello?).

From time to time you will be wrong and the effort of leadership is knowing the difference between wrong and right, making the decisions to fix the problem, and moving forward with the correct solutions. As leaders, we need to understand how to move on from being wrong. I often say the difference between a guitar player and a guitar virtuoso is that when a guitar player makes a mistake, they correct it and move on. When a virtuoso makes a mistake, they weave it seamlessly into the performance, so that you never even realized they were off the path. As leaders, we need to observe where errors are being made, determine what needs doing to fix the problem and fix it with a minimum of drama.

Failure implies a certain amount of liability, which is why people are reluctant to admit it. There are consequences for making errors, especially if you are so kind as to point them out to others. Errors may get you killed, or others killed, and in doing so, others are going to want punishment to follow. In many cases, punishment isn’t warranted for making errors; education and experiential learning is necessary. However, for some, since they failed to learn from their lesson and continue to insist on their being right, well, sometimes the lesson needs to come a little harder. Unfortunately, forgiveness requires grace and there’s just not a lot of that in society these days, so many people are reluctant to admit any wrong doing in any cases, even when they are being shown otherwise on so many fronts. When you insist you are right despite being told so many times that you are wrong, that’s just plain arrogance. It is hard to admit you are wrong in this day and age, but continuing to cover it up only makes the ability to forgive nearly impossible. This situation is the birthplace of litigation. But being so obtuse that you can’t even fathom how to be introspective and to learn from your mistakes, well that takes a special kind of person.

As leaders, we are going to be subject to making mistakes. As a strategic planner, I think the “stretch goals” we establish sometimes set us up for a hard fall, or at least, being on the short end of the learning curve. As my dear colleague Tiger once said (and I’m going to shamelessly paraphrase), “battle plans are useless once they have met the enemy”. For all the planning we do, once we engage, there are thousands of factors that spin in from all angles which may render all of the work we did to prepare completely ineffective. However, as Eisenhower said, “Plans are useless, planning is essential”. In planning we learn about all of those factors and in planning, we analyze and interpret, so we have a better chance of changing those factors once they come into play.

When I am being at my most cynical (which my wife says is often), I describe my job as dealing with risk, analyzing how to minimize the risk, then fixing the mistakes I made in minimizing the risk to begin with. Chaos theory states that "outcome is sensitive to initial conditions". If taking chaos and minimizing the risk, knowing that whatever we do will probably continue the situation down a path anyway until we can channel it in a desired direction isn’t what we do as leaders, I don’t know what else is.

We need to recognize our eventual fallibility, plan for it, embrace it, and learn from it. As a leader, failing to do that will just postpone the inevitable, which is not the desired outcome for any of us. Take the time to say you are wrong from time to time and realize that in doing so, you show your strength and your willingness to learn and grow. That’s the stuff leaders are made of.