Professor, former business school dean, expert on mistake proofing

Episode page with video, transcript, and more

My guest for Episode #186 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is John Grout. He is the former dean of the Campbell School of Business at Berry College in Rome, Georgia.

He’s the current Chair of the Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Data Analytics Department and the David C. Garrett Jr. Professor of Business Administration. John has overseen the development, approval and implementation of Berry College’s Creative Technologies program and Berry’s makerspace, HackBerry Lab.

Dr. Grout has researched mistake-proofing extensively and published numerous articles on mistake-proofing. In 2004, John received the Shingo Prize for his paper, “The Human Side of Mistake-Proofing” with Douglas Stewart. John has also consulted with a large variety of firms to mistake-proof their processes. Check out his website, www.MistakeProofing.com.

He’s also published “Mistake-Proofing the Design of Health Care Processes” a book that’s freely available online.

In this episode, John tells his favorite mistake story about using early mistakes to learn and then win a tower-building exercise, defeating a number of “A students” in the process. From John's story, what does that teach us about learning from mistakes — early and often — in a way that propels toward success? Why is this an entrepreneurship lesson (or a human lesson) and not just an engineering lesson?

We also talk about questions and topics including:

• Surprisingly, it’s the A students” who think they know how the world works

mistakes —

1. (strict definition) conscious deliberation that leads to selecting the wrong intention.

• Errors – breaks down then into mistakes vs slips