Varun Gandhi's greatest mistake: Lessons we can learn

Varun Gandhi made a master stroke in Pilibhit - and with one single speech he changed the course of his political career forever. The venomous communal nature of his speech has been condemned and discussed across the nation for the last many weeks. My intention is not to debate whether the speech was communal or not. (First off, this post is written under the assumption that the tape seen on TV is not doctored and it was indeed Varun Gandhi who made those statements!) Take couple of minutes to see the video below - Varun Gandhi's statement after the controversy erupted -


For me this act of Varun Gandhi where he passionately defends himself and tries to absolve from the crime is a bigger weakness of the individual than his speech at Pilibhit. He might have been compelled by the situation, driven by the impending elections (according to some an admission of his mistake would have been suicidal for his career and the party prospects) to defend his stand vehemently - but he lost a golden opportunity to set his record straight, to uphold the desired moral values and set a precedence of honest, sincere and straight politics.
The ability to acknowledge one's mistakes and accept a view different from one's position is such a critical value for success in teams. It's so common for multiple teams to work on the same project. Individual teams in a project will have their own individual dynamics, culture and power structure and when these different teams come together to work in a single project it's not surprising that there will be glaring differences. There could be some very obvious reasons for this rift including communication problems, difference in skill levels, different management style and managers etc. But it's been my experience that the inability of teams to reflect on their performance vis a vis the overall project goals and unwillingness to accept their mistakes is a major reason for the failure of a number of multi-team projects. It is not uncommon for people and teams to make mistakes, but it will snowball into a tragedy if the individual or team does not acknowledge that a mistake has been made, or still uphold that nothing has gone wrong. There are multiple effects of this kind of a behaviour in a multi-team environment:

1. It distorts the actual progress of the project and stalls any rational anaysis of the cause of failure.
2. The inability of a team to reflect on it's actual performance and failure is a closed approach and will lead to the status quo being continued. This eliminates the opportunity to analyse the shortcomings in the team and start a process of revival.
3. It will build animosity amongst various teams in the project and will bring down the morale of the team.

Reflecting more on it I realise that rarely have we been taught to accept defeat and acknowledge that making mistakes are alright. Our education systems (that is the Indian Education system) is highly intolerant of mistakes and failures - mistakes are treated with a rampant cane culture in schools, parents compete and terrorise their children to succeed and it is a social stigma to fall back in the race of life (yeah how many essays and speeches have I started with the line 'In this highly competitive world where everything is a rat race....'). But this attitude is suicidal when it comes to working together on a project or a mission and unfortunately many projects have fallen prey to precisely that attitude.
Whenever I have faced this scenario, I have always yearned for people who can take a larger systemic view who would put the success of the project above proving their point. It would be a dream to have a team like that with individuals who put the project above personal differences and ego. More and more I have got to work in multiple teams I have understood that the energy derived out of the synergy of all teams involved is much greater than the energies of all the teams combined together - and I hope that this value prevails in most teams - the willingness to say 'Yes I was wrong and now let's see how we can do it better'.