A bit more info about Christians get depressed too in these interviews:

God and Culture interview with Paul Edwards (starts at 29.10).
Covenant Radio interview with Todd Pedlar and Bill Hill.
Blog interview by Glenda Mathes, also published in Christian Renewal.

And here’s another on God’s Technology with Kevin Boling at Knowing the Truth.

Robert Sutton has authored or co-authored five books on management and leadership. The most important idea in his books is: “Failure is inevitable, so the key to success is to be good at learning from it.” In a recent blog he said his key test of leadership is: “What happens after people make a mistake?”

Sutton is especially focused on encouraging invention and innovation, activities that are always accompanied by failure. Professor Dean Keith Simonton’s research into creative geniuses found that, “Creativity is a consequence of sheer productivity. If a creator wants to increase the production of hits, he or she must do by risking a parallel increase in the production of misses. … The most successful creators tend to be those with the most failures!”

Sutton’s conclusion is that if business leaders want to stimulate creativity and innovation, they must create a climate of “forgive but remember.”

While informing your people that “failure is not an option” — in the famous phrase of Apollo 13 flight director Gene Kranz — might be useful on occasion for inspiring exceptional effort and resourcefulness, it sends a dangerously wrong signal. True, no one should choose the option of failure deliberately, but trying especially hard to avoid it means taking no chances on change. The better message to get across is that failure is a by-product of risk-taking, and honest mistakes will be forgiven.

Liberation and motivation
The Bible does not really encourage innovation in our spiritual life or in the church. The desire for novelty is usually associated with an unhealthy spiritual condition. However, Sutton’s message about the creative power of forgiveness, reminds us of the dynamo at the heart of the Christian life. We have a Master who encourages His servants to speak to Him about their doubts and failures, their honest mistakes and their dishonest mistakes, as well as their confidence and successes.

To show how a culture of forgiveness not only liberates but also motivates, Sutton quotes Harvard’s Amy Edomondson’s research into drug treatment errors in hospital nursing units.

To her amazement, the best nursing unit, where the boss encouraged nurses to talk openly about mistakes — and never pointed an angry finger of blame — reported about ten times more errors than the worst, fear-ridden unit. The key word in that sentence is “reported.” When nurses owned up to mistakes in the nasty unit, the leader treated them as “guilty” and “like a two-year old.” The tenfold difference in reported errors was due to psychological safety, not the actual error rate.

Sutton says that “a willingness to forgive is essential on the part of any boss who wants to set group norms that will lead to psychological safety and constant learning.” However, he goes on to argue that we should stop short of “forgive and forget” because “forgiving and forgetting, while temporarily comforting, condemns people and systems to make the same mistake again — sometimes over and over.”

That seems like a reasonable, rational, and logical argument doesn’t it.

Well, thankfully God’s grace is not reasonable, rational, or logical. He does not stop short but time and again reminds us that He not only forgives, but that our sins and iniquities He will remember no more” (Jer. 33:34; Heb. 8:12; 10:17). And there is nothing, nothing, nothing like that to liberate from fear and motivate learning.