Change Leadership training in LucerneManaging change: should mistakes be allowed during the transition?
When a procedure changes, managers must maintain quality while allowing teams to learn. How can they organise this transition without confusing permission to experiment with lower standards?
1. What the literature establishes
Nina Keith and Michael Frese (2008, Journal of Applied Psychology) synthesised research on training that encourages exploration and teaches people to use errors as information. Their meta-analysis identifies positive effects, particularly when learning must transfer to unfamiliar tasks. This finding concerns structured learning, not indiscriminate tolerance of operational errors.
2. Speaking up about difficulties supports learning
Amy Edmondson (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly) observes an association between team psychological safety and learning behaviours. Being able to ask questions, seek help or discuss a mistake provides a plausible mechanism for correcting incomplete understanding. During a transition, an unspoken difficulty may therefore deprive the team of useful information.
3. The premature conclusion: every mistake is useful
These studies do not justify letting employees experiment without safeguards in sensitive operations. An error only becomes instructive when it is identified, analysed and followed by an adjustment. The managerial task is therefore to define where experimentation is possible, which safeguards apply and when intervention becomes necessary. (our executive and employee training programmes)
4. The limits of the evidence and current practice
Findings on error management training do not demonstrate that a decline in quality during organisational change is necessary or beneficial. Nor does the psychological safety study, on its own, establish a causal relationship applicable to every reorganisation. Finally, announcing that mistakes are acceptable lacks credibility if performance assessments make no distinction between supervised experimentation, concealment and breaches of safety rules.
5. A practical check in Lucerne
In Lucerne, tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs provide different settings for this issue; in family-run businesses with short decision-making paths and strong regional roots, direct access to the owner does not itself guarantee that people feel free to report difficulties. As a hypothetical example, a hotel changing its reservation system could have employees process fictional cases before handling real bookings. Recording each error, its correction and whether a subsequent comparable case is completed successfully makes learning verifiable without exposing customers to risk. Within SHR's change management programme, this record can support an exercise defining a safe scope for experimentation, progression criteria and stopping rules. To go further: explore the Change Leadership training in Lucerne in the canton of Lucerne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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