I wrote a post the other week reflecting on how there are different types of mistakes. Originally, this post was just an addendum to that one, until I realized I had a lot more to say about “stakes” than I thought.
I completed that original post with a discussion of “high-stakes mistakes”—the mistakes you can’t afford to make, the mistakes that result in catastrophe.
I ended that post by rhetorically asking what catastrophe looks like in my life (or in yours, assuming that you are not an Olympian—or a soldier, medical professional, firefighter, police officer, construction worker, manufacturing worker, etc., anyone whose day-to-day touches life and death).
So, what does catastophe look like for a white collar worker?
Some high-stakes situations that apply to nearly everyone include job interviews, toasts at weddings, teaching moments.
If you make a mistake in those, most people can agree: Not so good.
But are they high stakes?
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A clerk at the US Passport Office misplaces someone’s passport application and ends up processing it weeks later than expected. The applicant cannot travel abroad, and misses his son’s wedding.
A car mechanic forgets to leave her calendar open for her son’s piano recital, so she cancels the conflicting afternoon appointment. That customer needed a working car to travel to an important job interview the next day.
The above situations have a few things in common:
- Someone made a mistake.
- Someone else suffered a significant consequence.
- The person who made the mistake was unaware of the consequence.
Both the clerk and mechanic would agree that weddings and job interviews are pretty high stakes situations. But they didn’t know about the potential consequences when they made the mistake.
Misplacing a file or forgetting a personal commitment as isolated mistakes are hard to view as high-stakes mistakes. As part of a larger web of human relations, you can begin to see them that way.
So, let’s add another commonality to the list above:
- Both people can agree on the stakes afterward.
So, even if you can’t fix a mistake, you can at least agree about it afterwards. The person who made the (ignorant) mistake and the person who suffered its consequences can come to terms and agree over the stakes.
But what if they can’t?
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When I made a mistake recently, the friction it caused with a colleague, oddly, was that we failed to agree on the stakes.
Even after learning of the stakes—that the colleague felt their efforts, which I’d failed to follow up on, were underappreciated—I didn’t agree on the stakes. I felt that their efforts didn’t merit the stakes my colleague insisted on assigning to them. The colleague sensed our disagreement, which only incensed them further.
I don’t know that there’s a neat solution here.
I want to create space for admitting and owning mistakes, and space for coming to agreement on previously unforeseen stakes.
But I also don’t want to box myself into a corner and assume that every moment of my life is a high-stakes situation. This would be an absurd way to live, assuming that every small action of mine might have a ripple effect outwards and ruin someone’s day.
Even in the examples were the stakes are imaginable—as with the passport clerk and the application—it would be ridiculous to ask the passport clerk to assume that any mistake they make might fracture the applicant’s family relations rather than just keep them from a planned trip to Cabo.
We need to make more room for (and understanding of) mistakes in our lives. We also need a bias towards low stakes. In a world full of invisible toes ready to be stepped on, I’d rather stay home.
Taylor Coe 