‘There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in’.
— Leonard Cohen
The Japanese word Kintsugi literally means golden (‘kin’) repair (‘tsugi’). Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery and ceramics with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as an integral part of an object's history. What is damaged, scarred and vulnerable is something to celebrate, rather than disguise. With kintsugi repairs, you can see the broken line; the line is celebrated and emphasised rather than hidden.
I call the mindset of reframing flaws and setbacks Kintsugi Thinking. It is a valuable lens through which to see the world. In our increasingly VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world, we will need to experiment as we explore the future and to do that successfully we must learn to embrace mistakes.
Mistakes are the foundation on which we learn. We are not always going to get it right. Things are not going to go as we planned. We need to approach every attempt as an experiment. We can keep experimenting our way closer and closer to figuring out which things are going to work and which are not. Mistakes can channel our thinking toward success, if we perceive them this way. Take for example, Toyota's culture. What sets the organisation apart ...
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