The Harvard Business Review have titled this month’s issue “The Failure Issue”. I celebrate this because failure is seen as… well, just failure, whereas it forms part of every business’ development. Of course, failure is not pretty and sometimes it has devastating consequences but the good thing about it is that we can learn from it.
Plenty of evaluation and dissecting of failure goes on in teams and organisations – as well as in individual’s minds, of course. So much have we focused on learning from failure that I fear some times, we forget to learn from success. When we achieve success or when we coast along successfully, we rarely stop to think why. Are we just happy to enjoy our success? Do we build on it by looking forwards and not analysing what we did in the past that enabled us to grow? Everyone understands the urgency to stop and dissect what led to failure but the opportunity to really learn from success is often missed.
That’s why I really welcomed the HBR’s article this month on learning from success. The article is published on the HBR website and is called “Why leaders don’t learn from success”. I won’t summarise their ideas here (I’d much rather give you the LINK) but would like to mention just one point. Well, two.
One of the main reasons why we should analyse our successes is because, in doing so, we might realise that forces outside of our control were key to our achievements. You can see how, if a team makes a breakthrough, that was due to luck, they might become unaware of the amount of work (and learning) that they still need to carry out. “We make our own luck,” I hear you say (some of you are whispering it even). Then it is important to identify what precisely allowed us to take advantage of a favourable situation.
The other point I particularly welcome in this article, was the fact that learning from our successes, does not mean replicating them. And that is why it is so important to turn them into a learning opportunity – to be able to remain succesful, but flexible. What we did yesterday might not be what we need to do tomorrow, but there are elements that might be worth persisting with.
Finally, it is so much more fun to learn from success than from failure, so why don’t we encourage this more often?
