Throwback Thursday: Perfection Is the Enemy of Learning

This was originally published in Bob Pike’s Creative Training Techniques Newsletter in May 1993.

The best classroom lessons don’t come out of a quest for perfection

At an early age, it seems, we become creatures driven by the quest for perfection.

What parent has not watched a child struggle with a newly learned task, riding a bike or writing letters of the alphabet, and heard the exasperated words, “I can’t get it right!”

As adults, who among us hasn’t smacked himself on the forehead when a task went awry and thought, “Geez, what a dope I am! Am I ever going to get this right?”

That quest for perfection is a path I think many people follow. I, for one, am guilty of making the pursuit of perfection one of my life’s goals and judging myself based on whether I was “right” or “wrong” in a given situation.

In an attempt to avoid being wrong, then, I have caught myself trying to control any potential learning environment and limiting the risks that I take in it. More often than not, though, I find there is very little I can control in those environments.

That realization leads to frustration, anxiety, and a lot of forehead smacking.

But rarely does any positive learning take place when learners constantly strive to be perfect and beat themselves up over mistakes.

If, however, as learners we could change that orientation and focus on learning from mistakes, we might actually learn a lot more. That doesn’t mean we have to stop trying to do our very best each time we attempt a new skill.

It simply means we have to stop making success an all-or-nothing issue and instead focus on incremental improvement with occasional failure as a measure of success.

My personal promise to reform to that line of thinking ultimately means a willingness to take risks and cheerfully make mistakes in the learning process.

But it’s not going to be easy. The reward of learning from mistakes serves to lessen the fear of failure, but it certainly doesn’t make it go away completely.

And that is the fine line trainers walk.

We tell trainees that our classrooms are safe havens in which people can freely err, but the training room is not without its own set of perceived dangers to trainees.

There are plenty of personal and professional pitfalls into which they might fall.

So we need to ask ourselves what we are doing, consciously and unconsciously, to encourage attendees to take risks in the classroom and learn from their mistakes.

Do we structure activities so that risk is encouraged and that failure brings the opportunity to learn?

Or do we rely on “safe” exercises that simply get both us and the trainees through the day?

Do we celebrate all kinds of learning, whether it comes from success or failure?

Those are important questions to consider as we balance our trainees’ needs to seek perfection, but to also accept and learn from their mistakes.

Duane’s Take

Perfection is one of the quiet enemies of learning.

It sounds noble. We want people to do good work. We want them to take the material seriously. We want the skill to matter.

But when perfection becomes the goal, people stop experimenting. They stop asking questions. They stop trying anything that might make them look foolish.

That is deadly in a training room.

Real learning requires some level of risk. Participants have to try the skill before they fully own it. They have to wrestle with the concept, make imperfect attempts, get feedback, adjust, and try again.

The trainer’s job is not to remove all failure from the room.

It is to make failure useful.

That means designing activities where mistakes are expected, visible, and recoverable. It means setting the tone early that practice is not performance. It means helping participants see errors as information, not indictment.

This matters even more today because so many workplaces punish visible mistakes. People learn to protect themselves. They stay quiet. They avoid practice. They wait for someone else to go first.

Then we wonder why training does not transfer.

If we want participants to use new skills on the job, we have to give them a place to stumble safely first.

A classroom that never allows mistakes may feel smooth, but it probably is not producing much growth.

The better question is not, “Did everything go perfectly?”

The better question is, “Did people leave more capable than when they arrived?”

And as Bob used to say,
Until next time, add value and make a difference.