We've all done root cause analysis. Something breaks, we dig in, we find the cause, we fix it. It's practically muscle memory for most leaders. We are taught from a young age to learn from our mistakes and business luminaries such as Bill Gates have even said “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.”
We know we can learn from failure and there may be risks in focusing on success, but we can't let those risks keep us from studying success.
In my observation in working with leaders and organizations for over 30 years, I have found that about 90% of improvement efforts come from trying to understand what's broken.
The machines that are failing, the performers that are struggling, the problems using up all the oxygen in the room.
Consider the leader who spends all their time with two performers who are struggling, while the other eight people on their team are ready to move up, ready to grow, and yet are ignored. The bigger opportunity isn't fixing the two struggling people. It's understanding why the other eight are thriving.
We want to correct mistakes, and we want to sustain successes. Both can and must be true.
Why Study Wins
The risks in studying wins are easy to identify, including ego and overconfidence. These may happen if all we study are wins (but they can happen on their own, can't they?) I'm suggesting we study the wins as well as the losses, not to do it in a vacuum. Here’s why studying wins needs to be part of our learning process.
- Wins are harder to learn from than losses. Mistakes and losses are loud and noticeable. If we don't acknowledge the value of our wins, we may miss the lessons entirely.
- Wins reveal important things. Wins help us see our capabilities and strengths, we don't often see those in the failures and yet all of us know we want to lean into our strengths when we can.
- Wins build momentum. If we only analyze failures, we risk becoming defensive and averse to risk. Those can build momentum but not the kind of momentum we want. All organizations want to be forward-looking, opportunity-seeking, and growth-oriented and our wins reveal where those opportunities can be found
- Wins can compound culture. When we acknowledge, celebrate, and learn from our wins, we create a culture of achievement and possibility. A constant focus on losses may reinforce a culture of fear, damage control and even reward the hiding of mistakes.
How to Study Wins
Here are some specific approaches you can take to help you systematically study your wins:
- Schedule win reviews. Make your after-action reviews and postmortems focus on wins as well as failures and mistakes. This creates an intentional process expectation and ensures we can learn from our wins.
- Interview people on winning teams or projects. When things have gone well, take the time to ask individuals what they did, how it worked, and what they'd want to repeat. This helps lock in those lessons for the individuals and allows you to generalize them for the larger group.
- Document what worked. Capture specific successes digitally. Consider the conditions that were present, the decisions that mattered, who contributed, and how collaboration happened. (The previous two bullets can be input for this.) This creates a searchable reference for future use.
- Compare and contrast wins versus losses. Don't look at wins and losses separately but rather consider them in tandem. This allows us to see patterns between them and identify the points of divergence where we could make different choices next time.
- Celebrate publicly. Perhaps the most common and least surprising of the items on this list, yet it's incredibly important to recognize what the wins were to encourage more wins in the future. Don't underestimate the power of public celebration of wins.
The Organizational Imperative
Everything I’ve described can be applied by an individual or by an individual leader wherever they sit in the organization. And the power of these ideas for the organization at large is critical too. Consider building training and systems to support studying wins, including using the ideas shared in this article.
Several of our expert guests at last year’s Virtual LeaderCon independently talked about the importance not just acknowledging but learning from what went well or we did right. This is one example of how valuable the event was last year. Want to gain wisdom from world-class thought leaders in real time and interact with them directly this year? Join us this month for Virtual LeaderCon. Learn more and register for free here.
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