http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/the-only-stupid-question-is-the-one-you-dont-ask/

I just read the posting, it was truly insightful and gave me so many “aha!!! this happened to me” moments. I agree with Laura about learning things and making mistakes.
I think one of the lessons I’d like to add to the collection would be ” Do not be afraid and/or embarrassed of asking questions even when you think it makes you look like the least knowledgeable person in the room.” The regret and the work involved when it later comes to light that it was in fact a valid question and a critical one at that, is overwhelming at times.

Thanks again for the list. It helped me remember the humbling lessons again.

Regards,
Kriti

I’ve re-read this post again after a long time and it still speaks true! It’s great to hear your story about learning from our mistakes. All too often we get bogged down in our mistakes and don’t have the humility to learn from them (myself included). What a great reminder that there is something to be learned from every experience!

And those who don’t make mistakes aren’t taking risks and growing. If you are constantly learning and trying new things, you are going to make a few mistakes along the way.

Best,
Laura

I have always remembered a situation that occured more than 20 years ago.
For many years a retail industry client with 100′s of employees and sophisticated custom developed computerised systems was in the situation where the total of their debtor’s ledger (containing the amounts owed by each of their individual credit customers), couldn’t be completely reconciled to the Debtor’s total in their General Ledger/Financial Accounts. In the big picture, the problem was very small but the unexplained difference increased each month by about $2,000. It was always reported as an issue in our firm’s Audit Management Letter, and eventually the client asked for assistance to resolve it once and for all.
The cost of me researching and reconciling the full accumulated error would have been be too expensive, but I could and did successfully reconcile the most recent month. That highlighted the kinds of errors that caused their problem, and the process that could be used to identify others in earlier months.

There were several causes of the unexplained differences, but the most memorable were:
1. The total of the individual invoice line items was not the same as the invoice total. The GL postings were based on line item amounts to get a product based revenue analysis into the GL, while the Debtors Ledger was updated by invoice total.
2. Debits didn’t always equal credits. If an error occured, the offending transaction would be immediately reversed out of the complaining customer’s Debtor’s Ledger account, but it wasn’t always transferred to another account until much later (days or weeks) when the error was followed up and resolved. So processing of the Debtor’s Ledger amounts were incomplete, and no record of this activity appeared in the GL at all.

These are two very basic assumptions, and here was a situation where both had failed.

There were other important lessons I learned from this assignment but the biggest one was definitely to be careful of assumptions.