"Mistakes are not always the result of someone's ineptitude"
About this Quote
Blame is seductive because it is simple. A fumble happens and we reach for a culprit, often assuming incompetence. Jessica Savitch pushes back on that reflex, pointing to the messier reality that errors often emerge from complex systems, conflicting incentives, time pressure, and unforeseeable variables. The lens shifts from character judgment to context: what conditions made this outcome likely?
Savitch knew the volatility of live television, where split-second cues, equipment, lighting, and scripts have to align. When they do not, the on-air face absorbs the fallout, even if the failure began with a faulty teleprompter, a garbled earpiece, or a rushed rewrite. Her observation highlights how public-facing roles attract disproportionate blame, obscuring the backstage network of decisions and constraints. It is an appeal for fairness, but also for effectiveness: if we misdiagnose the cause of a mistake, we fix the wrong thing and the pattern persists.
Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error: we overestimate personal flaws and underestimate situational forces. Leaders in aviation, medicine, and technology have learned to counter this with a just culture approach that distinguishes between reckless behavior and honest error, framing the latter as an opportunity to improve systems. Postmortems without blame uncover latent failures, tighten feedback loops, and make future errors less likely.
Savitch’s career unfolded when women in broadcast news faced relentless scrutiny, making the rush to label an error as ineptitude even more potent. Reading her line through that history adds a layer of social insight: sometimes what looks like a personal shortcoming is the spillover of unequal expectations and institutional shortcomings.
The statement does not absolve responsibility; it refines it. Accountability widens from the individual to the environment, from the last link in the chain to the chain itself. Real learning begins when we ask not only who erred, but what conditions made the error almost inevitable.
Savitch knew the volatility of live television, where split-second cues, equipment, lighting, and scripts have to align. When they do not, the on-air face absorbs the fallout, even if the failure began with a faulty teleprompter, a garbled earpiece, or a rushed rewrite. Her observation highlights how public-facing roles attract disproportionate blame, obscuring the backstage network of decisions and constraints. It is an appeal for fairness, but also for effectiveness: if we misdiagnose the cause of a mistake, we fix the wrong thing and the pattern persists.
Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error: we overestimate personal flaws and underestimate situational forces. Leaders in aviation, medicine, and technology have learned to counter this with a just culture approach that distinguishes between reckless behavior and honest error, framing the latter as an opportunity to improve systems. Postmortems without blame uncover latent failures, tighten feedback loops, and make future errors less likely.
Savitch’s career unfolded when women in broadcast news faced relentless scrutiny, making the rush to label an error as ineptitude even more potent. Reading her line through that history adds a layer of social insight: sometimes what looks like a personal shortcoming is the spillover of unequal expectations and institutional shortcomings.
The statement does not absolve responsibility; it refines it. Accountability widens from the individual to the environment, from the last link in the chain to the chain itself. Real learning begins when we ask not only who erred, but what conditions made the error almost inevitable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning from Mistakes |
|---|
More Quotes by Jessica
Add to List
