More Than One Mistake

More Than One Mistake

"I'll have an 'O' for awesome."

If you're of a certain vintage, you'll probably remember the moment. If you're not, bear with me; it turns out there's a useful lesson in it. David Tua, one of New Zealand's most successful heavyweight boxers, appeared on a television game show and, under pressure, famously responded, "I'll have an 'O' for awesome."

The answer was wrong.

The moment quickly entered popular culture. It was replayed, joked about and, for many people, became one of the first things they associated with David Tua. I recently found myself thinking about that moment after an old YouTube clip appeared in my feed. What caught my attention wasn't the mistake itself, but what it seemed to reveal about how quickly we can define someone by a single moment in time.

Here was a young man who won more than fifty professional fights, challenged for a world heavyweight title and competed against some of the best boxers of his generation. Success at that level doesn't happen by accident. It is built on years of discipline, preparation, resilience and an ability to perform under pressure that most of us will never experience. Yet for many people, one incorrect answer on a television game show became more memorable than everything that came before it.

That hardly seems fair, yet it also isn't particularly unusual.

In workplaces we sometimes do something remarkably similar. An experienced worker makes a mistake, an operator overlooks a step, a supervisor misses something important or an organisation experiences an incident. Before long, the mistake itself becomes the story while the circumstances surrounding it receive far less attention.

If we applied the same thinking that still appears in some workplace investigations, we might simply conclude that David Tua made a mistake. Case closed.

Yet that explanation feels incomplete because it tells us almost nothing about why the mistake occurred.

If we applied a simple 5 Whys approach, the conversation quickly becomes more interesting.

Why did he give the wrong answer?

Because he responded incorrectly under pressure.

Why was he under pressure?

Because game shows are intentionally designed to create stress, urgency and time constraints.

Why does that matter?

Because human performance is influenced by far more than knowledge alone. Pressure, workload, distractions, expectations, confidence, fatigue and the environment all shape the decisions people make.

Very quickly, the discussion shifts from the individual to the conditions surrounding the event.

The answer remains wrong, but our understanding becomes richer.

That's one of the reasons I've become increasingly interested in approaches such as Human and Organisational Performance (HOP), Learning Teams and Safety-II. Although they differ in their origins and emphasis, they all encourage us to become curious before becoming critical. Rather than immediately asking, "Who made the mistake?" or "What's wrong with this person?", they encourage us to ask a different question:

"What made sense to them at the time?"

That doesn't remove accountability. It doesn't change the outcome and it certainly doesn't suggest every mistake should be excused. What it does recognise is that human performance is shaped by context. If we genuinely want to learn, we need to understand the conditions that influenced the decision rather than simply observing its outcome.

To me, that's where curiosity becomes so important. Good investigators, auditors and leaders rarely stop at the first answer because they recognise that understanding usually lies beneath the obvious. Rather than accepting the outcome as the explanation, they become curious enough to ask why it occurred, what influenced the decision and what can be learned from it. Those questions rarely produce simple answers, but they almost always produce a richer understanding.

One of the ideas I find particularly interesting within Safety-II is the suggestion that we can learn as much from success as we do from failure. Traditional approaches naturally focus our attention on what went wrong. Safety-II encourages us to also ask what normally goes right and why.

Viewed through that lens, David Tua's famous answer becomes a rather interesting case study. The mistake itself lasted only a few seconds, while the successful career surrounding it spanned decades.

If we focus exclusively on the error, we learn very little. If we step back and consider the broader picture, we see someone who spent years performing successfully under pressure, adapting to challenges, overcoming setbacks and competing at an elite level. The more interesting question may not be why he made one mistake, but how he achieved so many successes.

That shift in perspective doesn't ignore the mistake. It simply places it in context.

I sometimes wonder whether organisations can fall into a similar trap. Incidents quite rightly attract attention because they are visible and often require investigation. Yet every day workplaces also experience thousands of examples of work succeeding under variable conditions. People solve problems, adapt to changing circumstances, recover from disruptions and make countless decisions that contribute to successful outcomes.

When we focus exclusively on failure, we risk overlooking the very capabilities that make success possible.

To me, that's where investigations, assurance and organisational learning create their greatest value. The objective isn't simply to identify that something went wrong. It's to understand why work usually goes right, why it occasionally doesn't and what both can teach us about improving organisational performance. Curiosity sits at the centre of that process because every worthwhile investigation begins with a willingness to understand before rushing to judge.

Perhaps that's the lesson I've taken from David Tua's famous answer over the years. Capable people make mistakes; that much is obvious. What interests me far more is that a single mistake often tells us far less about a person's capability than the countless examples of success that came before it.

When we reduce people to a single mistake, we often stop asking the very questions that lead to understanding. In doing so, we risk learning less, judging more and overlooking the broader story that really deserves our attention.

Whether in sport, leadership or the workplace, I think people deserve to be remembered for more than their worst moment. Perhaps that's one of the most important lessons curiosity can teach us.