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My guest for Episode #16 of “My Favorite Mistake” is Jamie V. Parker... she's the guest host. This gets complicated… she was my guest (as the guest) for Episode #8, where she shared her favorite mistake. Today, she's the guest host and she's interviewing me about a recent mistake that I made, a combination of errors and problems that almost led to me losing four episodes that had been recorded, but not released.
I also talk about something that might be a “favorite mistake” from my days working in manufacturing, a mistake that I wrote about in the book Practicing Lean (and Jamie also contributed a chapter to that book. Another thing Jamie and I have in common is podcasting, so please check out her podcast here.
You can listen to or watch the episode below. A transcript also follows lower on this page.
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Quotes:
!["I went through all the stages of grief in a way, but I thought, OK, I've got to learn from [the mistake] and, and try to carry on."](https://www.markgraban.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Mark-Graban-My-Favorite-Mistake-Quote-2.png)
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Automated Transcript (May Contain Mistakes)
Here is the cleaned-up transcript. I have removed the timestamps, corrected stammers and filler words (like “um,” “you know,” “uh,” “so yeah”), and smoothed out the conversation flow for readability.
Intro: Episode 16, Mark Graban. Wait, what? Yeah. Oh yeah. I'm the guest today. I make mistakes too. A couple of poor decisions on my part. We can call these process problems that I have complete ownership of. Okay. Not the victim here. I'm Mark Graban. This is My Favorite Mistake. In this podcast, you'll hear business leaders and other really interesting people talking about their favorite mistakes because we all make mistakes, but what matters is learning from our mistakes instead of repeating them over and over again. So this is the place for honest reflection and conversation, personal growth, and professional success. Visit our website at myfavoritemistakepodcast.com. Thanks for listening and now on with the show.
Jamie V. Parker: Well hello! I am Jamie Parker of Process Plus Results and the host of the Lean Leadership for Ops Managers podcast. It might be a little bit of a surprise here. I'm actually guest hosting today for a very special episode where I'm going to interview Mark Graban today. Now I know that you know Mark from being the host of My Favorite Mistake, but what you may not know is he also hosts several other podcasts, including Habitual Excellence, Lean Whiskey, and the Lean Blog podcast. So if you want to catch him somewhere else, you may want to check one of those out too. Alright. So let's just dive in. We know we want to get straight to those mistakes. So, Mark, thank you for having me. Let's jump in here. Why don't you tell us about one of your favorite mistakes?
Mark Graban: Yeah, well, so this is a more recent mistake. It's probably not amongst my favorite favorite of all time, but I thought it was worth talking through. And so Jamie, thank you for accepting my introduction to kind of turn the tables after having you on the show.
So going back about two weeks ago… to jump to the end of what I thought had happened: I thought basically due to a combination of an external hard drive crash and a couple of poor decisions on my part—we can call these process problems that I have complete ownership of, okay, not the victim here—I thought I had lost, across the Habitual Excellence podcast and here on My Favorite Mistake, something like seven podcasts that I had recorded with different guests in a week. I thought the hard drive was toast, unrecoverable, gone. And for reasons I can maybe explain, I had no backup. I had the drive backed up, but that week did not get backed up. I had already sent emails out to these different guests, apologizing profusely that I believe the recording that we had done was lost and asking, “Would you please consider rerecording and taking another half hour out of your busy schedule?”
Jamie V. Parker: All right. So you had this backup, but not for the last week. So there was something in place, but now we've got a potential major issue. Tell us more what happened?
Mark Graban: There were a number of factors. The work I've done in health care—not to get too sidetracked on this—the quality improvement and patient safety people often talk about something called the Swiss Cheese Model. You may have a process with different protections in place, but if everything goes wrong all at once… if you think of all the slices of cheese, if there were an arrow running through them and the slices of cheese could rotate, all the holes have to line up just perfectly. And occasionally that's going to happen. What happened in my situation here was fairly similar.
I record episodes and put them on an external hard drive. This is a Mac-based system. And I use a service called Backblaze, which automatically continually in the background backs up the hard drive on my laptop and the external drive. I was back in Texas for a week, which is kind of a secondary permanent home. And the beauty of the external hard drive is that you can plug it into the iMac sitting on the desk there. So I was using that to record the interviews. I was throwing the files onto the external drive 'cause I knew I would be coming back to California after a week.
So then when I had that crash, there were a couple of mistakes I made. One was that if I had just copied the files from the iMac to the external drive, they would have still been on the iMac. So I moved the files to the external hard drive, which again, I thought was being backed up continually automatically by Backblaze. No, I'm not blaming Backblaze—I have been very happy with their service. They helped me recover from the hard drive crash everything that had been backed up. But I made a bad assumption. I think this is very common… sometimes technology companies will blame user error and we feel like, “Oh, that's not fair. You should have made it easier to use.”
So a bad assumption and lack of research on my part is that I assumed that that external hard drive, when it was plugged into the iMac, would also be backed up because that iMac had Backblaze software running on it as well. So the mistake I made was not understanding that it was only a backup when it was plugged into my laptop. So there were a number of these factors where if the hard drive had failed when I was in California, I would have had a complete, full backup, thanks to Backblaze. And again, they're not a sponsor, I'm not blaming them. I'm happy with Backblaze. So it's kind of at the timing of when the hard drive crashed was maybe some bad luck.
Jamie V. Parker: The holes in the cheese are starting to line up. I can see it.
Mark Graban: I end up losing that week. So there are a number of things that, had I done differently or had circumstances been different, I wouldn't have lost the data. So I learned from this and I could start thinking through different countermeasures of backing up. I could have the files on the external drive and I could also back them up in Dropbox. I have the storage capacity for that.
So I was already down this path of thinking about short-term recovery, apologizing to the guests. And most of them were very gracious. I hadn't heard back from a few people. Nobody was mean about it. Everyone was very understanding about it, which I appreciate greatly. I was already thinking through countermeasures to prevent this from ever happening again. But then it occurred to me like, well, maybe the drive isn't as dead as I think it is. And so I found a piece of software that was able to download and scan the drive to tell me if any of the files are recoverable. And if so, you can pay $40 to recover them.
So that software helped me quickly realize, okay, the drive isn't completely dead. It appears there's data there. For some reason, my Macs cannot read the drive. So it took about 24 hours literally for that software to run and realize that yes, I was actually able to recover all of those files. Then I was able to send a happier email: “Space cadet, wait, never mind, the files aren't lost. We don't have to rerecord. I'm going to cancel the rerecord sessions that had already been scheduled.”
So in a way all's well that ends well, I didn't have the data loss, but to frame it in terms of healthcare or other situations, I would call this a near miss. And even though it worked out well in the end, there are still huge learning opportunities that I can put measures in place to make sure that this potential near miss failure doesn't happen again.
Jamie V. Parker: Yeah, absolutely. And especially because you did have some countermeasures in place, right? So this wasn't a brand new problem, you've been podcasting awhile. You put some measures in place, all the holes lined up. And then you're going to say, “Oh, I'm going to make changes to my processes now.”
Mark Graban: Yeah. And I made a couple of changes. One is, my experience with these external hard drives of different brands—whether I'm using them for Time Machine backups or additional storage—they will fail after a couple of years. It's just a matter of when, not if.
Jamie V. Parker: I'm thinking I have one, I might need to think through that.
Mark Graban: So part of why I wanted to do this episode, as self-indulgent as it might seem, is that others can maybe, including yourself, learn from my mistakes or my near miss. So it's a little bit more expensive, but I bought as an external drive not the traditional spinning hard drive, but an external SSD solid state drive, which could still get corrupted. There are still reasons to back that up, which it's now happily doing connected to my MacBook Pro. And again, thank you Backblaze. That drive is less likely to fail. There are still risks that I could lose the drive or that it could get corrupted in some way. So I'm still doing the backup. So to me, that's sort of like maybe now belts and suspenders. Could I add a second pair of suspenders by also keeping the files in something like Google Drive or Dropbox? Maybe I should still consider that.
Jamie V. Parker: Well, and one of the things that as I hear you telling this story is that there was a happy ending in this case where for just $40, you were able to recover all of these. And it strikes me that there's even a lesson there too, because despite that happy ending, you're still making those countermeasure changes in your process.
Mark Graban: Well, I think it's… seeing in healthcare there are so many more near misses than there are actual incidents. So that makes it all the more important to learn from a near miss before it becomes a harm incident, or to even be proactive, which is what it seems like maybe you're doing. You're being proactive, Jamie, in response to my story of “what can we do to prevent unsafe conditions?” Let's eliminate risks instead of just responding when there's a known near miss. So I think that's one of the other lessons or reflections that I have from my day job of trying to apply that here to the podcasting realm.
Jamie V. Parker: Fantastic. So any other kind of broad general lessons that you think as far as, how do you take this and then apply it to maybe something that's not related to your podcast technology?
Mark Graban: The idea of learning from mistakes? Well, hopefully… trying to find ways to reflect on what we've done and not even the things that were like a gut punch. Like thinking I'd almost lost this data really hit me hard for a day and a half. And I had no one to blame but myself and I went through all the stages of grief in a way, but I thought, okay, well, I've got to learn from it and try to carry on. Kind of like when I think of situations in my career, other mistakes that were formative, maybe even a deeper way than a potential hard drive crash. So, you know, you've got the book Practicing Lean over… I'm going to again hold up a copy of it. Jamie contributed a chapter. I wrote a chapter. Can I share one of the stories?
Jamie V. Parker: Yes. Let's hear one of those stories from a mistake. We have heard your recent mistake, maybe one of the other mistakes that might be one of your faves.
Mark Graban: Yeah. So I think there's a common theme between the book Practicing Lean and this podcast, My Favorite Mistake, of learning from what we've done, realizing we're all human. At some point in our career, we're all going to make mistakes, but I think one of the keys is learning from them and moving forward. So one of the stories that I shared in my chapter in the book was thinking back… this was going back to 2004, this is the last manufacturing company that I worked for. And I was in an internal process improvement role, my job title on my business card, which I hated by the way, said “Lean Expert.”
Jamie V. Parker: Oh, wow.
Mark Graban: I don't like that job title. Why it flies in the face of what it means to practice something like… if I'm an expert, does that imply that I know it all? I don't have to continue learning. You reacted really strongly to that—what comes to mind for you?
Jamie V. Parker: Well, especially the self-described expert. Like it might be one thing if I say, “Oh, you know what? I think we really need to talk to Mark. He's an expert in lean healthcare,” where I'm deciding that from my perspective you have that expertise. But that self-described expert I think is what I was reacting to.
Mark Graban: I don't even like it if you were to be so kind as to be called an expert in something. Now it was a corporate decision that I had the certification similar to a Black Belt that they called “Lean Expert,” but I begged and pleaded, “Could I please put anything different on my business card? Like Lean Coach or Lean Facilitator, or even no job title been better?” But the bureaucracy said no.
Anyway, in that organization, as part of that certification, I was expected to go do a project out in a production area. Long story short, there was an opportunity to use some Lean methods. And I created, if people know the jargon in our field, a production Kanban system of basically determining and doing the math on what the batch sizes should have been on some different components and how often the setups on those machines should be done and what the sequence of those setups should be. It was a technically correct, well-designed system that got me certified, but ended up having no benefit to the business. Do you know why? You can probably guess. Nobody used it. What point is there in designing this technically correct system that would have been helpful, except nobody used it?
And now I'm not going to blame the people in that department for not using the system. This is on me and to some extent on the organization. I'm kind of sent in to swoop in to do the analysis, to come up with a solution, to put it together. Yeah, I talked to the people working in the area, but now I recognize I didn't fully engage them as much as I should have. Now I've reflected on that and that's been inspiration to me to make sure I do more of that.
In my defense, at the risk of sounding like I'm blaming the organization I worked for, it was not a highly participatory culture. I was a little bit afraid that if I had done more to engage folks that I would have gotten in trouble for interrupting them or bothering them or getting in the way of them doing their production work. So there's maybe divided responsibility. I could have done more. Like my gut was telling me, “I need to involve people more,” even before I realized, “Oh gosh, nobody's using this.” And I think within the boundaries of that culture, I could have engaged people because I thought it was the right thing to do. If I wasn't courageous enough or whatever word would be correct to use… but I've tried to learn from that and realize, for one now as an external consultant, I'm not going to allow myself to be placed into a situation where I'm expected to come in as the expert and design something and hand it off. I don't want to do that again.
Jamie V. Parker: Well, and I think that's we see that so often whether it's an external consultant or an internal whatever, whether it's continuous improvement or something else where someone creates it and then hands it over to somebody else to execute.
Mark Graban: Yeah. So that's the difference between doing change to people instead of doing change with. And then I'm curious… I almost feel like I'm back into interviewer mode, but I'm going to throw it back to you: At what point do you look at, “Okay, well, here's what the culture is and what the culture would want me to do or pressure me to do versus me doing what I think is right”? That's tough to navigate.
Jamie V. Parker: It is tough to navigate. And I actually have seen that, felt this, and experienced this recently with COVID-19 and what I believe to be safe precautions, and then being onsite with a client with masks and physical distancing and all of that. But then there being some activity where that's not happening and kind of feeling like, “Whoa, I have a responsibility to myself to be authentic here as well.” And I think that's so common that we have this. One of the things that I see is that I actually think that culture is local, meaning that we can have an organizational culture, but really we can still have this local culture based off of the leadership and the team and how we're working together. And so that's an opportunity to say, “Gosh, you know what, let's change our culture.”
Mark Graban: I've seen that a lot within hospitals. A departmental director can do a lot to create a local culture within their team. Even if the broader organization as a whole is not engaging everybody in continuous improvement, it can be done locally. There's maybe some risk that someone higher up the chain makes a decision that counteracts some of that, but that local culture can be pretty resilient, I think.
Jamie V. Parker: Yeah, I think so too. And we can just look at organizations and see this when you have a leader leave, and then it seems like everything changes in that department, whether we would classify it as for the good or for the bad. We can see that when a leader leads or leaves, or it could even be an influencer and a strong influencer within the team.
Mark Graban: And one other thought about this situation back at this manufacturing company… if it's something related to health and safety, like you're describing, I would probably be more likely to buck the culture. And there are times, going back to even my first job out of college, where I made waves. I remember the maintenance manager in particular in the first plant I worked in did not like me because I kept speaking up about safety risks that were not being fixed. I thought they were not being prioritized properly. And calling that out led to that maintenance leader feeling personally attacked. But there's a point of like, am I here to make friends, or am I here to look out for the safety of the people working in these departments that I'm an engineer for?
And then there was one other time where from a quality standpoint—this could have ended up being a “my favorite mistake” story, but long story short—when I was at General Motors, I had a really serious quality concern about some connecting rods, which are metal pieces that are inside the engine. And I thought some really bad decisions were being made. And I tried escalating this and I wasn't getting any sort of response through the direct kind of proper channels. So I thought, well, I can make one last appeal to my industrial engineering boss who heard me out and agreed, but I think he didn't feel like he could do much anything about it.
So I thought, “Okay, I need to be more dramatic.” And so I marched out to the factory, grabbed one of these connecting rods. It was dripping in grease, carried it through the factory, through the office. If I remember correctly, I was probably dripping grease on the carpet, which I apologize to the housekeeping crew for. But basically marched into my boss Sid's office and kind of semi-slammed this greasy connecting rod part down onto his desk. And I thought, “Well, I don't know if this is going to end up being a fireable offense on some level, but it was a point where I felt strongly enough about it.”
I didn't really care about any consequences. Like it might've ended up being a favorite mistake story of like, “Yeah, maybe I lost my cool and that wasn't the best way to make a point,” but it was better that I left that organization anyway. But to his credit, Sid realized that, okay, I cared enough about this and it was serious enough. And I explained again what was going on? And he went and sort of took on that charge as my manager. Didn't get fired. There were times when maybe there are noble firings and I don't know if it would have been one.
Jamie V. Parker: Yeah. I mean, there's certainly choices and decisions we make for our alignment with an organization and to feel like we can make those decisions. I know there are a lot of folks who feel like, “Hey, I can't,” from an economic situation or whatever.
Mark Graban: Right. And that's where it's like another soap box issue: in healthcare, I think we can't lecture people that you should speak up. Like a nurse or a tech who doesn't speak up about a physician's bad behavior, doesn't speak up about an impending safety risk because people do fear retaliation and they do get retaliated against. And so I always think like, if I were a single parent, I was the only paycheck and I had children at home, I'm going to be really super cautious. I wouldn't expect anyone to jeopardize their job or their family or their home, or something like that. Someone else might be in different personal circumstances where they could make a favorite mistake and do something that hits you, gets someone fired for speaking up, but they might also rationalize, “Hey, that wasn't really a place I was happy at anyway.”
Jamie V. Parker: It strikes me, I hear a lot kind of in that continuous improvement space… we talk a lot about the need for senior leadership engagement and active involvement. And when I go to conferences or talk to other practitioners, I hear a lot about that: “Well, I just don't have that. What do I do?” And there always is of course, the opportunity to leave if that's a choice you want to make. But I also think that it's so important to recognize the influence we do have and say, “Okay, but I may not be able to change the whole organization, but I bet I can still improve lives right here within my span of influence.”
Mark Graban: Yeah. That's well said. And I'm going to throw it back to you for another plug for your podcast. Jamie, our guest host here has been Jamie Parker. Among other things, she has a podcast called Lean Leadership for Ops Managers. I have that correct. Right?
Jamie V. Parker: Right.
Mark Graban: So everyone go check that out. And I know a lot of your early episodes where you were just sharing thoughts… you've started interviewing people occasionally?
Jamie V. Parker: I do. Yeah. So I've had a couple of interviews so far, one with an ops manager. We had Ron Pereira join us to talk about Lean daily management and then an upcoming episode with another couple of practitioners talking about daily meetings. So it's fun to just start having some guests on for sure.
Mark Graban: And we're going to give a plug again for Practicing Lean. This is also practicing interviewing and practicing broadcasting, right?
Jamie V. Parker: Yes, it is.
Mark Graban: So thank you for practicing and being willing to step in and indulge me with an opportunity to talk about some mistakes as a guest here on My Favorite Mistake.
Jamie V. Parker: Thank you, Mark. I'm glad to be here and glad to see you leading the way.
Mark Graban: Well, I'm trying and thank you for what you're doing and we'll just keep at it right.
Jamie V. Parker: That's right. All right.
Mark Graban: Thanks for listening. I hope this podcast inspires you to pause and think about your own favorite mistake and how learning from mistakes shapes you personally and professionally. If you're a leader, what can you do to create a culture where it's safe for colleagues to talk openly about mistakes in the spirit of learning? Please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Our website is myfavoritemistakepodcast.com. See you next time.
This episode examines a podcast backup mistake as a near miss and what it reveals about process design and assumptions. Leaders and creators will find practical lessons on preventing failure before it happens.