Creating a Self-Healing Organization and the Wisdom of Porcupines

I was reading this morning about self-healing composites, materials that can repair themselves while still in operation. Picture an airplane wing healing its own cracks while you search for your seat. Pretty cool. I’ve also recently learned that porcupines are self-healing. They get a bit over adventurous, creeping too far out on weak tree branches, and thus often fall from trees. The result is they jab themselves with their own quills. Fortunately, the quills are coated in a natural antibiotic, so they heal quickly from their self-inflicted wounds.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we and our organizations could be similarly self-healing, especially so when our wounds are self-inflicted. And as far as corporations go, research seems to show that most wounds are self-inflicted.  I believe, with the right mindset, our organizations can be self-healing, and in the process we can avoid inflicting further damage.

Things go wrong every day. It’s a great world, but it’s not a perfect world. The good thing is, we can control for the most part how these events impact us and how we respond to them. The first step is to move away from the immediate instinct to assign blame when things go wrong, and instead look for positive intent and learning opportunities.

When a project goes wrong at work, it is generally improbable that someone purposefully decided to make themselves look bad by turning the project in the wrong direction. They probably were acting in good faith, with positive intent, but failed technically or their decision wasn’t correctly aligned with the broader goals of the project, thus sending the project off course.

When things do go wrong, our natural inclination is to look for who we can blame…and how we can divert any of the blame away from us. If we move from this attacking mode to a mode of curiosity where we seek just to understand what went wrong, we create a healthier culture and a learning culture. We actually learn from mistakes rather than burying them under blame. And we create a healing organization.

We should also recognize that when we seek to assign blame, our biases tend to get in the way of assigning it in the right place. According to research, we tend to ascribe blame “to the person or persons who evoke the most negative affect or whose behavior confirms unfavorable expectations.” In other words, we are biased to assign blame to those for whom we already hold a negative opinion, not necessarily those who caused the adverse results.

This may make us feel good. We’ve assigned blame for a problem that could have made us look bad and we assign it to someone we don’t like. But what is the longer-term outcome here? Diminished trust and psychological safety within the organization. If those in the organization recognize that blame was misplaced or overly placed on one individual, the feeling of psychological safety, and the willingness to take the risks necessary for an organization to thrive, both diminish substantially.

When we find positive intent and allow the team to learn from the situation, rather than assigning blame and punishment, there are two very important outcomes. First, we increase adaptivity and creativity within the team. If we know mistakes are something that the team can learn from, we are more willing to try new things and adapt more quickly in uncertain environments. There will, at times be setbacks, but with learning the long-term gain will be significantly magnified.

Second, when we create this culture, we return the locus of control to the team, removing it from an outside “manager” whose job is to assign blame. An internal locus of control has been shown to increase creativity in many organizations and when we feel we are in control, we’re better able to connect with the intrinsic motivation that is necessary to excel and to heal.

As I’ve been researching some of these topics, its also come up that creating an environment based on finding positive intent, and moving away from blame, also can reduce the level of bullying and harassment that are prevalent in many workplaces, as well as reducing the time and energy devoted toward rumination and revenge. Through focus on positive intent and learning, we develop attributes of trait forgiveness and a healthier culture.

I would say don’t be the prickly porcupine, which is somewhat apt, but more so I’d say we actually want to be a bit like the porcupine, creating antibodies in our organization through vigilantly setting aside our need to blame and instead focusing on and recognizing positive intent.