Why and How to Do Hansei to Learn from Your Mistakes at Work
With the economic and social challenges that are being experienced in this post-pandemic, economic inflation and massive layoffs, many of us feel out of place, lost and even fearful of our job position and career. In my years working as manager of the Gemba Academy's content development department, I learned a very interesting Japanese concept that I loved and for the last 4 years I have applied at the end, beginning and middle of each year, this concept is HANSEI.
First, I want to thank Jon Miller, Kevin Meyer, and Ron Pereira for introducing this concept to me, and not just to understand it but to adapt it, and making it part of my life. Let's start by talking about the meaning of hansei.
Hansei (反省) is a central idea of Japanese culture that means reflecting or acknowledging our own mistakes in order to improve.
In our culture, unfortunately, we are not taught to identify, recognize and learn from our mistakes. We prefer to avoid the subject, ignore it and continue. But the truth is that as the same scientific method teaches us, the best learning and discoveries are made through observation, formulation of a hypothesis, experimentation, data analysis and accepting or nullifying the hypothesis.
Well, the same thing happens with errors, we have to propose, take an action, analyze what happened and either repeat or change the method. How are we going to improve if we don't learn from our mistakes?
Now that we better understand the meaning of hansei, an exercise that has brought me many benefits is to perform hansei on my professional path at the end of the year. And here I share the steps that have worked for me in this practice.
1.- Hansei is simple, identify the problem. Don't get overwhelmed trying to create lists, graphs, much less huge charts with data and reflections. Use a piece of paper and a pencil and write down the moments in your career this year where you think you could have done better, you missed something, you made a bad decision, the results were not what you expected, you had a lack of knowledge, you didn’t have enough determination or even when you didn’t perform the way you know you can, etc.
2.- For a good hansei, you have to be honest and speak from the heart. Take responsibility for your failure. This self-reflection is not a report that you have to present to anyone, it is for yourself. Nobody is going to qualify you, much less judge you, you are going to learn from what you lived through and for that, you have to be honest. Many experts recommend an exercise of standing in front of a mirror and looking at ourselves when we practice hansei.
3.- Understand how you feel towards the problem. You need to keep learning about yourself, this would help you to understand the why of your decisions and actions. What motivated you to act that way? How do you feel about it?
4.- Commit to improve, take actions. At the end of our hansei exercise, it is important to understand and learn from those mistakes, but also to create an action plan and change for the better. For example, if in my reflection I found that I couldn't achieve one of my career goals because my English grammar isn't good enough, now I have an opportunity to add to my action plan. If my current job or career is not giving me the same excitement as before, after my hansei, I need to seek for other options, and maybe even change my profession. I’ve done this in the past and I discovered that I am capable of things I never imagined.
And you will be surprised with everything we can discover about ourselves, our professional career and how learning from our mistakes can move us towards a more conscious profession and in which we do a better job each time.
Have you ever done hansei about your professional career? Or if you practice it after reading this article, leave me your comment, I'd love to know your results.
Until next time!
Ana Cruz
