As I heard one engineering leader say, "it's okay to make mistakes — once". Meaning, we're all fallible, mistakes happen, but failure to learn from past mistake

As I heard one engineering leader say, "it's okay to make mistakes — once". Meaning, we're all fallible, mistakes happen, but failure to learn from past mistakes is not optional. That said, a challenge I have frequently run into, and I feel is not uncommon, is a tension between the desire not to repeat mistakes and ambitions that do generally involve some amount of risk-taking. The former can turn into a fixation on risk and risk mitigation that becomes a paralyzing force; to some leaders, lists like these might just look like "a thousand reasons to do nothing" and be discarded. Yet history is full of clear cases where a poor appreciation of risk destroyed fortunes, with a chorus of "I told you sos" in their wake. It is a difficult part of leadership to weigh the risk tradeoffs for a particular mission, and presenting things in absolute terms of "lessons learned" rarely makes sense, in my experience. The belt-and-suspenders approaches that make sense for authoring the critical control software for a commercial passenger aircraft or an industrial control system for nuclear plants probably do not make sense for an indie mobile game studio, even if they're all in some way "software engineering".