Why Learning from Success Can be Challenging

Understanding why things happen and why certain decisions lead to specific outcomes is the key to learning. Learning from failure is an important skill that many people and companies strive to develop. However, learning from success is just as important, and presents greater challenges, according to an April 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review. These challenges stem from three impediments to learning, as follows:

• Fundamental Attribution Errors – attributing success to management’s skills and insights, rather than to external factors or random events.
• Overconfidence Bias – success can increase confidence in ability to high levels, leading to more-optimistic forecasts of future success and overly risky moves.
• Failure-to-Ask Why Syndrome – it is natural to ask why failure struck, but not why success was achieved.

To overcome these obstacles, it is important to understand the process of learning and to use good performance to generate more success by understanding how success was achieved. The following includes five approaches and strategies to use in order to learn from success:

• Celebrate success but examine it – investigate what led to success with the same scrutiny used to understand the causes of failure.
• Institute systematic project reviews – conduct reviews after the project, regardless of the outcome. Ask the questions: What did we set out to do? What actually happened? Why did it happen? What would we change next time? What would we do the same next time?
• Use the right time horizons – understand the appropriate time dimensions and ensure it is used to evaluate performance, particularly when the feedback cycle is especially long, such as in the pharmaceutical industry.
• Recognize that replication is not learning – replication is not the objective to achieve success, rather, determine the causes of success by understanding which factors can be controlled, by using tools like Six Sigma and total quality management.
• If it isn’t broken, experiment – experimentation can be used to test assumptions and theories about what is required to reach high levels of performance.

It is equally important to evaluate the causes of good performance and bad performance to better achieve success and avoid failures.

Original Article Source: “Why Leaders Don’t Learn from Success“, Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano, Harvard Business Review, 2011