This morning started the way most mornings do for me. Shuffling into the kitchen in my PJs in the dark, half awake, needing that first cup of coffee before I am fully prepared to be a human. So I slid a pod into my Keurig machine, hit the brew button and went to let the dog out. When I came back a few minutes later, I was not met with a piping hot cup of coffee, but rather a gaping hole where my coffee cup should have been. In my morning fogginess and grogginess, I forgot to put the cup under the spout. Now here's the thing. I didn't flood the kitchen. I didn't ruin the machine.

I lost a little coffee, barely even made a mess on the counter and was able to move on. The Keurig had quietly caught most of the spill for me. And standing there with my paper towel in hand, I found myself wondering, why do some mistakes at work turn into disasters while others barely leave a trace? Why do some workplace systems seem to expect us to be human and others are actually shocked when we are? And what if the real lesson in leadership isn't about stopping errors altogether, but about designing for what happens when the coffee spills?

In this episode, I'll show you why errors aren't a leadership or an organizational failure, and how designing for error recovery leads to better systems, better decisions, and better outcomes at work. Now let me get technical for just a moment and talk to you about errors. There are two different kinds of errors, slips and mistakes. And let me illustrate those two types of errors with my Keurig.

So a slip is when you forget to do something. So when I forget to put a cup under the spigot before hitting the brew button and the coffee brews into the reservoir and spills over that reservoir onto the counter, that was a slip. It was an error in execution on my part. What I did was not what I intended to do, so I made a slip. Now, I can accommodate that error in execution by setting it all up the night before, complete with the coffee mug under the spigot. I can do that when I'm not half asleep, so I don't make that same slip early in the morning when I'm half asleep.

Now the other type of error is a mistake. A mistake is an error in planning, and often. And it's not like I didn't plan to put the coffee mug under the spigot. I did plan to do that.I just forgot I slipped. So a mistake is categorically different. A mistake is often because that we don't know something. We have a gap in our knowledge base and we're not able to plan accordingly. Now, I have another Keurig example for you of this. At my doctor's office, there is a keg. So while you're waiting for your appointment, if you get there early, you can make yourself a cup of coffee or hot chocolate. They have a few different types of pods, tea to choose from. There is a big sign above the keg that says to select the small or medium size, because there's three different buttons that you compress for a small, a medium or a large coffee. And it says very explicitly on this big sign that they have taped up to the wall above the machine to select the medium or small. Because the paper cups that they have only hold 8 ounces, which would be the medium size. So I can imagine there were lots of people choosing the large size and then having their coffee overflow onto the counter or into the reservoir that sits underneath the Keurig where your co or is part of the Keurig, but sits underneath where your coffee cup goes. So they know and they're like instructing around it so that people don't make that mistake again. So a mistake would be an error in planning. So, and again it would be if you were at the doctor's office and you hit the 12 ounce without that sign on the wall instructing you to do otherwise, it would be a mistake because you didn't know any better. So a lot of times those mistakes are gaps in our knowledge.

So, there's two kinds of errors, a slip and a mistake. Now, as I stood there with my paper towel, like, literally astounded that there was not much coffee to clean up because I have a nice big mug that, you know, gets filled to the brim, it's at least 12 ounces. And I was surprised when I went to, like, I thought, oh my gosh, there's gotta be coffee everywhere. And sure enough, there wasn't. I mean, yes, there was some coffee on the counter, but the reservoir, which sits underneath where your cup sits on the machine is designed to catch those overflows. And apparently the slips when you forget to put the coffee mug under the spigot altogether. So what I thought about as I stood there with my paper towel wiping up again, not all that much coffee.

I thought, you know, this is what we need to do in organizational life and in leadership. We need to build reservoirs, not punishments. So the reservoir under the Keurig, it did not scold me it did not lock me out. It did not require me to change my password. It did not send an alert to management or require that I go to retraining on how to make myself a cup of coffee. It simply contained the fallout. So the extra, say, 4-6 oz or whatever it was that my cup would hold, that was more than the Keurig reservoir would hold. That's what I had to clean up.

But the Keurig itself contained most of the fallouts. So now, as we make some parallels to organizational life, reservoirs would look like buffers in timelines, maybe some redundancy in handoffs within a project team, a draft review before something goes in for its final submission, guardrails instead of approvals, and a clear rollback plan when things go sideways, because sometimes they do. Now, leaders often jump straight to accountability when something spills. But I want you to employ your user experience or UX thinking. And instead of, you know, jumping to accountability, blame and repercussions, I want you to instead ask, where could we have built a reservoir? How could we have built this to accommodate errors? Because we know errors, whether they be mistakes or slips, we know they're going to happen. Now, this doesn't mean we're letting people off the hook or removing accountability altogether. It just keeps small errors from becoming big ones. Because my small error of not putting a mug underneath that spigot ended up being a fairly small error.

There was only maybe again, about 4 ounces or so of coffee to clean up. It wasn't running off of the counter, down behind the stove or anything like that. It was just a small, a small slip to clean up. So again, when we design for error recovery, it doesn't remove accountability, doesn't say accountability is not necessary. It just makes those small errors less likely to become big ones. So again, the same recovery, in this case with the Keurig, that reservoir underneath where the cup sits works for both slips and mistakes. And this is an important distinction here, because not all designs, when you're designing for error prevention and recovery, not all of them are going to work for both slips and mistakes. But in Keurig's case, it did, which makes it an even more elegant design.

The Keurig reservoir doesn't care why the error happened. Forgot the cup, caught it. Wrong size cup caught it. That's elegant design. Now let's translate this to a leadership lesson. You don't always need different rules or different reservoirs for different types of human error or human failure. You often need a better system level recovery. Think again.

The analogy of building that reservoir, building into the system some way for people to recover easily from errors. So at work, leaders spend an enormous amount of time diagnosing who messed up and why did they mess up. But really, I think the more powerful question is, why did the system that we've designed allow this to turn into a mess in the first place? And designing recovery is first going to reduce the stakes of being human, because it is human error that leads to most mistakes and slips and, you know, again, errors in organizational life. And. And the best leaders that I work with are not asking, how do I get people to stop making mistakes? Instead, they're asking, where can we build a reservoir? How can we design a system that accounts for humans being part of it? Because your system is not going to be able to make that recovery easy for users, easy for employees, easy for team members if it's not designed that way.

So your system, if it can't tolerate a spill, it's not designed for humans. It's designed for some fantasy life. So as you navigate your organization and your work this week, I want you to think about my example of the keg, and I want you to really ask yourself, where in our organization are we asking people to remember the cup? Where in our organization are we asking people to know technical things like what? How many ounces does this paper cup hold? Where are we asking that them to know that and to not either slip up or not make mistakes? And instead, where can we consciously, intentionally take a step back and redesign a process, redesign a system, redesign something so that the human element is accounted for and not, again, not accounted for in a punitive sense, but accounted for in like a. Hey, you slipped up. You made a mistake. I got you just like the reservoir on my Keurig coffee machine. All right, my friends, it's kind of a shorty episode this week, but again, I just couldn't leave that coffee spill on the counter.

I had to tell you about it because it just reminded me so much of the ways in which we can design organizational life to account for the human errors that we can absolutely expect and that we should come to expect. And again, when we catch them, small and literally catch them, like the reservoir and the Keurig coffee maker does, it prevents them from causing catastrophic damage across other parts of the organization, whether those be organizational relationships, customer relationships, or other systems that you interact with. All right, my friends, think about my coffee this week as you navigate organizational life and think about how can you redesign something to make it just a little bit more able to withstand human error, whether they be slips or mistakes. All right, my friends, that is your UX thinking lesson for the week. Be well, carry on and make it a good week.