my head won’t shut up… i think i had such a good holiday that now my mind’s working with a vengeance. some day i will meet an appropriate therapist who’ll help me find the off switch, but until then, i will continue blogging 😉
so. i was thinking about mistakes versus incompetence. this stemmed from introspecting about my impatience with incompetence. the difference made sense on the surface until i tried to question it more deeply and understand exactly what the heck i meant. i’ve come across the sentiment about ‘mistakes that move you forward’ being ok, but it was too new age and imprecise for my satisfaction!
…boo-boo or incompetence?
so this is what i came up with, and since i’m an instructional designer, the points are specific to ID.
incompetence is:
- not advocating for learners
- transferring our lack of understanding to learners
- not knowing the reason why and creating ID dogma (which affects learners, fellow IDs and other functions we work with)
- misleading or miscommunicating with peers (deliberately)
- making others feel unsafe when working together (there should be mutual trust)
- not planning for/considering contingencies
- ignoring/not catering to explicit requirements
- not knowing how to fix mistakes (especially, not asking for help)
so apart from these things, i think everything else is a (forgivable) mistake. i’m not saying the mistakes may never have business impacts or be big, but they’re boo-boos from which something can be learned so the situation can always be salvaged. i don’t think mistakes impact our basic credibility or raise questions about our intentions.
OTOH, the incompetence list is my set of deal-breakers, so to speak, because these are not things we can lose sight of in the name of innovating or taking creative gambles. nothing really justifies our letting these things happen because they’re fundamental to the essence of what we do and why we do it.
oru kuttu. 