When I was working in film, the answer to today’s behavioral question was very clear: Admit mistakes? Never. Be glad you got your foot in the door, prove yourself as the pro you might one day be. Pretend you’re an infallible crack surrounded by wimps pretending to be infallible cracks. Never apologize, immediately blame someone else who can’t fight back.
And there are really many opportunities in this profession to cause huge damage with small mistakes. Starting with looking into the film canister, just to check whether it was the one with the material you just shot, to the moment when you remember where you put the film flap, namely in the Plumeau, where it was during the shooting of a sensitive love scene, the cameraman finds it through his eyepiece.
I wound up power cables to the left instead of the right, which only sounds like a trifle to those who have never tried to unroll the twisted things in the rush of a construction (not been caught). I dented a light bus while reversing with the generator attached (got caught but just stubbornly blamed it on the generator). In the absence of a fog machine, I used black powder fog for indoor shots, which caused the two naked protagonists to cough and laugh in the bathtub (turned out to be the most beautiful variant during the editing and was used). The worst thing: I spoiled a whole day of shooting a small documentary about Stasi reprisals with very emotional interviews by misadjusting the sound recording device (there was no denying it, and unfortunately the protagonists had better control of themselves during the reshoot).
I don’t think it was because of the mistakes that nothing came of my film career, but among other things because I didn’t follow the advice I mentioned at the beginning with enough consistency and was clearly too careless and clumsy in slandering colleagues to get the to provide the necessary benefits.
That is certainly purely anecdotal and distorted by insults, especially as it is decades-old empirical knowledge. It was definitely a coincidence that I experienced a much more relaxed approach to mistakes in independent theater productions. But maybe it was just because there was a lot less money at stake.
In modern corporate management, the error culture is now on everyone’s lips. The blessings for the working atmosphere are always communicated as well, but we can confidently dismiss that as compliance nonsense. The error culture is particularly interesting from a commercial point of view. Mistakes can and must happen when companies attract innovation and growth as their driving forces. You try out new processes and then you realize what works and what doesn’t work. And only when it really crunches and squeaks do you know that you have reached a capacity limit. Mistakes are referred to as friends in feedback conferences: we can learn from them to become even more efficient. So you earn yourself by making mistakes, boasting about them and, best of all, explaining yourself how to fix them and avoid them in the future. It goes so far that you anxiously ask yourself what you have done wrong again in the area of error culture. Or how one could twist a rope from the competitor’s infallibility.