Watching the Olympics these last couple of weeks I have been struck by the difference between mistakes and failure. Last night Sasha Cohen skated onto the ice as a potential gold medalist and within seconds fell attempting her first jump. What came next? She bobbled the second jump too. What came next? She pulled herself together and won the silver.

A week or so ago, also within seconds of starting her program, Chinese pairs skater Zhang Dan was thrown to the ice and crashed into the wall. What came next? Her partner Zhang Hao helped her up, and within minutes they restarted their program and they won silver in their event as well.

How do they try these jumps again so soon after falling on that hard, unforgiving ice? The figure-skating commentators (who aren't winning many fans themselves, but that's another story) have pointed out more than once that attempting a difficult jump and failing gets more points than not attempting it at all. So you could say that it's built into the mechanism of the sport. Try, fail, try again.

I understand making a mistake and "covering" for it in performance. I'm a musician, and one of the things I practice is how I might fudge my way past a forgotten chord change or lyric, so that the performance doesn't come screeching to a halt. But that's not the same thing. There is no fudging around when you land on your butt on the ice. It's obvious. And it's painful. So how do they learn to move past the pain, shame and fear quickly enough to jump right up and move back into the program?

If we could learn that in business, our innovation efforts would be vastly more successful. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Gwen and I are working on a conference presentation based on the "what drives innovation?" theme I've written about here before. As part of our research, last week I interviewed Vincent Barabba, former head of strategy at GM and author of Surviving Transformation. The discussion turned to fear of failure and learning from mistakes, and at one point I apologized for letting us get off topic. "Actually, this is central to your topic," he replied. He's right. Vince's theory -- one mistake should be allowed, and a concerted effort made to learn from that mistake. And the rewards system should reward experimentation.

It seems to me that as a culture -- except for isolated pockets such as sports -- we've lost any serious approach to learning from mistakes. This may be partly because learning from a mistake means taking responsibility for having made it in the first place. If you can't do that, you can't get to the learning.

And then, how *do* you learn from mistakes? It can't be as simple as,"Well, I won't do that *that* way again." It's much too facile to say "we must learn from our mistakes" and "we must create an environment that rewards risk-taking." *How* does that work on a corporate level, or in a business of any size?

Photo: ©Amy Sancetta/AP, from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer