You just escaped an event that could have resulted in a major financial loss or a serious injury. But you escaped it. You are now out of it and your finances are in place and your health is intact. You take a deep breath and move on with your life. Or do you?
Rollback a bit and take a pause. What just happened there? In simple words, you just got lucky. What are the chances that it won’t happen again? A more pertinent question may be, why were you in that situation to begin with? Were there signals out there hinting of a looming disaster? Did you ignore them and just moved on until you were almost hit by it? Now that you got lucky, what do you do? Move on or fix what brought you so close to a disaster? The answer is obvious.
In a book, Managing the Unexpected by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, they argue that resilient organizations treat near misses as failures and make sure that they are never faced with that situation again.
If we as individuals, start to treat near misses as failures and take actions to prevent a repeat, we’ll be better at managing our work, relationships and responsibilities we are entrusted with.