Mistakes of Commission and Omission
This is a summary of a part of this insightful blog post on The Systems Thinker:
A mistake of commission is doing something that fails. E.g, Deciding to hire a person who turns out to be a bad hire.
On the other hand, a mistake of omission is failing to take action when action was required. For example, if you’re a leader at a startup that has a bad work culture, not fixing it is an error of omission.
Among the two, errors of commission are usually milder — if you do something and it backfires, you can fix it. On the other hand, errors of omission can be catastrophic. People say that looking back at their life, they regret what they didn’t do more than what they did. This applies to companies, too: many companies have remained stuck in their old ways and gone bankrupt.
While errors of omission are more serious, companies punish people more for errors of commission. This is because they’re obvious, and so factored into your evaluation. Errors of omission are not accounted for — how can someone even know that you could have done something, to hold you accountable for not doing it? The incentive is that if you do something, you could be blamed for it, while if you did as little as you can get away with, you escape blame. So people in organisations, and organisations as a whole, make no changes. It’s common in organisations for people to say “I’m fine with the proposal if everyone else is”. This kind of indecisiveness and inaction is an abdication of responsibility, going all the way to the CEO level.