To quote Samuel Smiles: “We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake, never made a discovery”.
The aviation and medical professions investigate their mistakes openly and thoroughly, with a view to learning from them and not repeating them. However, I’m not convinced that the erosion and sediment control industry is quite so willing to investigate and avoid its mistakes. I have been in this industry over 20 years, and I still see the same mistakes being made time and again.
Silt fences have been around for decades. And yet we still see well-intentioned but sadly misguided people install them in inappropriate locations such as across watercourses. We’ve all seen check dams that will cause water to scour around the sides. The building and construction industry has managed to make safety an intrinsic element of business-as-usual, but the basics of erosion and sediment control still elude the majority.
Part of the problem is our unwillingness to admit when we got it wrong, and to collectively learn from our mistakes. Eleanor Roosevelt said “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself”. It is time we developed a culture of sharing not just our successes, but also our failures.
So in the spirit of airing some dirty laundry, in this presentation, I’ll share some of my failures. And I’ll ask you to share some of yours too. If we are going to keep pushing our industry to be better, to discover and to innovate, we need to self-assess and acknowledge what we got right, what we got wrong and what we could do better. Let’s not keep that knowledge to ourselves.
.jpg)
