The Current | October 2026: A Mistake Is One Problem. How You Handle It Can Become Another.

Every month, we send The Current to B2B leaders who want communications intel they can actually use. Below is our latest issue. If you’d like it delivered directly to your inbox, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.

This issue: every company makes mistakes. The real test is what happens next, and whether anyone inside your company believes making it right is their job.

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The lead

The Current | October 2026 — Kwedar & Co.

A mistake is one problem. How you handle it can become another.

Something is going to go wrong. 

A shipment is late. The wrong part arrives. A deadline gets missed. Someone on your team makes a promise the company doesn’t keep.

Your customer is frustrated, but the relationship isn’t necessarily damaged. Not yet, at least. Most reasonable people understand that mistakes happen. What they remember is what happens next.

Does someone on your team say, “This is ours. We’ll fix it”? Or does your (confused and upset) customer get shunted into a maze of bureaucracy? Marketing says it’s an operations issue. Operations says sales entered it incorrectly. Sales says someone in fulfillment needs to handle it. Everyone may be technically correct, but the customer still has the exact same problem.

Even worse, now they have a second one: they’ve learned that when something goes wrong, no one inside your company feels responsible for making it right. And let me tell you right now, their forgiveness and understanding are withering by the second.

This is not a customer-service problem. It is now a reputation problem.

Mistakes may be inevitable, but indifference is not.

What we’re seeing

Most leaders assume their people know what to do when something goes wrong.

“We take care of our customers.”

“We do the right thing.”

“We own our mistakes.”

Wonderful. But what does that actually authorize someone to do?

Because there’s a big difference between telling employees you value accountability versus building a company where people can practice it.

If fixing a customer’s problem requires three approvals, employees learn to wait. If someone gets reprimanded for stepping outside their lane, they learn to stay firmly in it. If every problem gets handed upward instead of owned where it lands, eventually “not my department” becomes the safest answer for survival.

And then leadership is shocked when a customer encounters a problem and nobody steps forward. Unfortunately, your people are usually doing exactly what your culture has trained them to do.

Now, this is where reputation gets interesting.

We tend to think reputation is built in the big, visible moments: the press coverage, the keynote, the polished website, the industry award.

It absolutely is.

But reputation is also built in the moments you’d rather avoid: an invoice is wrong, a delivery gets missed, a customer complains, or something important falls through the cracks.

What happens next tells your customer just as much about your company as any of the big, visible moments do.

The question isn’t whether your company will make a mistake, because it will. Instead, it’s whether the person who discovers it believes fixing it is their job.

The cautionary tale

Imagine a company we’ll call Apex.

Apex has worked with the same supplier for years when it lands the biggest opportunity in its history: a facility tour for a major prospect. The kind of prospect that could materially change the business.

Apex orders what it needs well in advance and explains exactly what’s riding on the delivery.

The wrong parts arrive, and nobody realizes it until the line is running for the visitors.

Bad? Absolutely.

Recoverable? Probably.

Apex calls the supplier in a panic. The first person says it isn’t his department. The next blames the warehouse. The warehouse blames the order system. Eventually someone with authority calls back and leads with a discount on a future order.

Nobody says the one thing Apex actually needs to hear: “We screwed this up. This is ours. Here’s what we’re doing about it.”

Then Apex discovers another error in the same shipment—one the supplier already knew about but hadn’t mentioned. And suddenly the story isn’t about the wrong parts anymore.

Now it’s about trust.

That’s the danger of a badly handled mistake: every new failure changes the meaning of the original one. What looked accidental starts to look systemic. By the end, Apex isn’t asking, “How did they send us the wrong parts?”

Now they’re asking, “Is this the kind of company we can trust when something important is on the line?”

That’s a much harder (and more expensive) question to recover from.

One thing worth your time

This month, ask your leadership team one question:

If a customer came to any employee in this company with a serious problem tomorrow, what is that employee equipped to do without asking permission?

If the answer is “not much,” start there.

Maybe they can expedite a replacement, credit an account, pull in a senior leader, stop a shipment or waive a fee. Or maybe their authority is simply to stay with the problem until they know exactly who owns the next step.

The specific authority will look different in every business, but the principle shouldn’t: the customer should never have to navigate your company to get your company to care.

And when someone does step outside the comfortable boundaries of their job to make something right, make sure you sing their praises from the rooftops.

Because you can put “accountability” on the wall, or you can build a company full of people who see a problem and think: that's ours. Let’s fix it.

About The Author

Lauren Kwedar Cockerell is founder and president of Kwedar & Co, a Fort Worth-based PR, messaging, and strategic communications firm serving purpose-driven B2B companies. She is also the firm’s lead PR and marketing strategist, host of our podcast The Impatient Entrepreneur, as well as a frequent podcast guest.

Over the past 20+ years, she has worked with 100s of leaders and organizations to create PR and marketing strategies and tactics that support visions and reach goals.

To connect with Lauren, please send an email above, or book a consultation.