1 week Ago
Most strategies account for goals, key metrics, and a plan for execution. The best go further—clarifying priorities, sequencing decisions, and anticipating risks. But even the most experienced leaders often miss a crucial step: defining their Acceptable Mistake .
An Acceptable Mistake is the opposite of a risk. A risk is something to be mitigated. An Acceptable Mistake is a tradeoff you make on purpose —something you’re willing to ignore in order to focus on the things that are important right.
Every business decision involves a tradeoff. If it didn’t, there wouldn’t be a decision to make. There would be only a single, obvious path forward, which wouldn’t warrant a discussion.
The question isn’t whether you’ll make a tradeoff. You will–consciously, or subconsciously. The question is whether your team has been intentional about deciding which tradeoffs you’re making and why .
Prioritize bringing a product to market more quickly, and you might compromise on how much market research and testing you have the time and resources to do before launch. Prioritize comprehensive testing, and you might lose opportunities to generate revenue by coming to market sooner. If you don’t define an Acceptable Mistake early in the planning process, departments end up talking past each other and ineffectively debating the causes of downstream misalignment later.
At that point, decisions won’t feel like intentional tradeoffs. The myriad tradeoffs you inevitably made in the planning process will feel like mistakes that trap your team in a cycle of finger-pointing and playing not to lose, as opposed to maximizing the upside. More importantly, failing to articulate an Acceptable Mistake at the onset will leave your team without the language to define which levers were most important to drive business goals.
An Acceptable Mistake doesn’t threaten your core strategy—it protects it. It’s a permission slip to move forward with clarity toward your primary goal, rather than stretching your team thin trying to optimize for everything at once. The right tradeoff depends on your goals, company resources, product type, and market.
But the clarity of that tradeoff—documented explicitly, and used as a consistent decision-making factor by all departments—is what allows companies to move with confidence. Examples include: Acceptable Mistake: Slower Time to Market Priority: Comprehensiveness of Research or Testing If you’re building a product that’s expensive to manufacture or difficult to change after launch—like medical devices, hardware, or infrastructure—speed is a risky place to cut corners. In these cases, your Acceptable Mistake might be moving slower to ensure rigorous testing and research.
Even if that means launching after a competitor or missing a seasonal window, the priority is protecting brand trust and reducing the risk of costly recalls or failures. Acceptable Mistake: Incomplete Testing Priority: Speed Some products—especially software—are inexpensive to iterate on and easy to update post-launch. Here, launching quickly is often more important than conducting extensive research or product testing.
This can be the right call if you’re trying to capitalize on a time-sensitive market opportunity or need real-world data to validate assumptions. In these cases, learning in-market may be more valuable than pre-launch perfection. Acceptable Mistake: Narrow Initial Target Audience Priority: Fast Revenue Generation or Learning Sometimes, your Acceptable Mistake is launching to a smaller segment of your market or releasing an incomplete feature set.
If your goal is to generate revenue quickly, learn from early adopters, or test product-market fit sooner, sacrificing the size of your total addressable market up front can be a smart tradeoff. This is true even if the path to expand to a larger market later isn’t tactically clear before launch. You can develop the expansions later, using insights learned from the initial launch.
This is where many strategies quietly falter: teams discuss KPIs and success-metrics cross-functionally, but skip the conversation establishing an Acceptable Mistake as a decision-making criteria. An Acceptable Mistake can’t live in a single department. It has to be discussed and agreed on early.
When developing or iterating on a strategy, ask: “Which factors won’t compromise our ability to achieve our biggest goal?” “What are we okay being ‘blamed for’ in the retrospective, as long as our primary objective succeeds?” “Does leadership know about and agree with the tradeoff, or will they be surprised later?” Alignment here prevents mediocre decision-making and ineffective attempts to hold people accountable later. It creates a shared language for success. Your team will know what “good” looks like and which metrics are important and unimportant to measure it, before results come in.
Every strategic choice inherently accepts something you're choosing not to optimize. The strongest strategies name this clearly, early, and together. If you haven’t explicitly defined it, you can’t assume there’s cross-functional agreement.
You know you’re aligned on your Acceptable Mistake when: Your team can describe the tradeoff in a sentence. And of course: everyone is describing the same tradeoff. Retrospectives feel focused on big-picture metrics and results, not laden with friction re-litigating downstream processes and decisions.
Leadership doesn’t isn’t surprised that lower-impact initiatives were deprioritized or given less attention. Ensuring buy-in and alignment early in the process doesn’t just make your team more efficient and deliver better results. It removes friction and establishes a virtuous feedback loop of greater effectiveness, communication, and momentum.
Teams that deliver true innovation and long-term growth play to win, which requires confidence taking calculated risks using a clear decision-making framework . This lets them focus their attention on what matters most, without investing energy on vanity metrics or internal politics that make individuals look good but don’t influence business outcomes. What makes an Acceptable Mistake truly "acceptable" is that it's articulated intentionally, based on clear goals and outcomes.
An Acceptable Mistake is a strategic decision made deliberately with senior leadership's full understanding and endorsement. If this alignment doesn’t happen during the planning process, post-mortems become the wrong place to hold people accountable for the decisions and tradeoffs they made. Most teams align on a North Star Metric.
But in my experience, the teams that also define their Acceptable Mistake are more likely to consistently hit their KPIs . The next time you're launching a product, campaign, or strategic initiative, don’t just ask, “How will we measure success?” Ask: “What’s our Acceptable Mistake?” Then make sure leadership agrees, before execution begins. It might be the most strategic decision you make.
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