F*cking Up, Meeting Titles & Hot Flashes
You are going to break something. Probably this quarter. A date, a deliverable, a number in a deck that went to a board.
And for womxn, those inevitable mistakes cost us more.
First, we're penalized more. Heather Sarsons studied five years of Medicare referral data and found that after a patient death, referrals to female surgeons dropped 34%, while referrals to male surgeons barely moved. Then it gets worse. Referrals to other female surgeons in the same specialty fell 53%. There was no equivalent spillover for men. Our mistakes don't only get charged to us. They get charged to the next womxn in line.
And we don't only get judged more harshly, we also believe we owe more apologies. In a twelve-day diary study, women apologized more often than men — not because they were quicker to grovel, but because they counted more of their own behavior as an offense worth apologizing for in the first place.
The problem isn't contrition, it's calibration. We get less room when we actually break something, and we spend credibility apologizing for things that were never broken, so there's less of it left when something real happens. So this week: what to do when you fuck it up. Because we all fuck up sometimes.
🔍 Measure the Size of the Mistake
Ask yourself these four questions, in this order. Answer them with facts, not with how your stomach feels. As the research tells us, your stomach is an unreliable instrument.
Did it leave your shop? If you caught it before delivery, it is not a client mistake. It's a Tuesday.
Is it reversible, and at what cost? Fixable before it matters, fixable after with effort, or permanent — a printer ran 5,000 copies, an ad set spent, a pallet left the warehouse.
Did it cost your customer money, time, or standing? Money and time show up in an invoice or a calendar. Standing is the one you're least likely to catch, because it happened in a room you weren't in — your error landed in front of their boss, their board, or their own customers, so what you damaged was their reputation and not just your deliverable.
Is this the first time, or the second? The same error twice doesn't call for a bigger apology, but rather requires a systems solution.
Your answers sort the mistake into one of four sizes, and the size of the amends should match the size of the issue.
Non-event. Caught internally, no cost, nobody downstream. Worst case, it impacts a deadline.
Friction. Reached your customer, reversible, cost them a little rework or patience. No outside exposure.
Real. Cost your customer money they can absorb, a date, or work they now have to manage. Think: the wrong colorway shipped to a customer.
Exposure. Your customer's standing took the hit, a third party acted irreversibly, or the money is large enough that your customer has to escalate it — get an approval, explain it to someone above them, or absorb it in their own budget.
🗣️ What to Say at Each Tier
😶 Non-event: say nothing. Fix the error and move on.
This is not permission to hide things — the test is whether the error left your shop, not whether you think your client will notice. An internal catch is the system working, but take a look at how close you came to shipping a mistake, and consider if internal changes should be made. Don't narrate the catch to your client--it spends credibility you will want later, and wastes your client's time and worry on something you already fixed.
😐 Friction: name it, fix it, but don't overdo it.
One message, no remedy, no throat-clearing. A remedy here is the tell that you think the mistake was worse than it was.
The deck is coming Thursday instead of Tuesday. The data pull came back incomplete and we chose to re-run it rather than send you numbers we didn't trust. I've moved the review to Friday so you keep your buffer before the board meeting.
That's it. Cause, judgment, fix. No refund, because nothing warrants one. If the timeline doesn't work, they'll let you know.
😬 Real: same day, with the fix already moving, and a remedy that matches.
Say what happened, what you're doing, and what changed on your end so the same error doesn't recur. Then price the remedy to the damage — replacement, a credit for the hours your customer lost, the rush fee you're eating. Not your whole invoice.
You received the wrong colorway. That's our error — we mislabeled a bin during a packaging change. The correct item ships today with a prepaid return label, and you don't need to do anything but drop the other in the mail. We've added a color check at pack-out.
😰 Exposure: pick up the phone, today.
Your customer's standing, or a number they have to explain to someone above them, is the damage — so this cannot be an email they read after their boss does. Call, lead with what you already have in motion, and bring something concrete on the money — not as penance, but because they have their own repair to do and you just made your mistake their problem. Follow the call with the written version so they have something to forward.
🔁 No Matter the Size
🙋♀️ Own it before it's found. Being the one who reports the mistake is most of the repair. Waiting to see whether anyone notices converts a mistake into a character question, and you will lose that one.
‼️ Consequential explanations only. An explanation gives your customer information they can use. An excuse asks them to make allowances for you instead. "The data came back incomplete so we re-ran it" tells them why Thursday is the honest date. "It's been an insane week and my subcontractor went dark" tells them nothing they can act on and quietly makes your circumstances their problem.
🎭 Don't perform it. "I'm mortified, I've been up all night, I feel sick about this" hands your customer your feelings to manage on top of the thing you broke. Be accountable, not devastated.
📆 Then be unremarkable for a month.
The mistake doesn't close when you apologize. It closes weeks later, because clients don't judge errors one at a time — they pattern-match. One error plus a file that's a day late three weeks later becomes "they've gotten sloppy." The same error followed by a month of early, clean, boring work becomes "that one time."
So the systems change you named in the repair is the thing you now quietly do. Research on corporate apologies found they work because people weight the reform signal more heavily than the admission of fault — which means the month of unremarkable work isn't atonement, it's the actual apology. A deliverable gets one more proofread and goes out a day early. A shipment gets verified before it leaves the warehouse. Advice gets double-sourced where you'd normally shorthand it.
Two ways to wreck the quiet month: announcing it, and never stopping. Nobody needs to hear about your new QA process, and a year of penance repositions you as junior. A few weeks of care, done silently, then back to normal.
Sitting on a mistake and can't tell which tier you're in? Say it out loud to people who've broken things too at our next Work With Day. Because collaboration over competition includes not white-knuckling this alone at 11 p.m.
🪢 Laura & Lauren
Things We Loved This Week
LaurA’s Things
🎷 Who wants to come to Red Hook with me?
Lauren’s Things
💪 Am I…a Stalone fan? (Or maybe just a Lulu Garcia-Navarro fan.)
🔥 We are not.
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