I have spent a career and built my brand around helping people come to terms with and embrace failure. This stance is not popular in many high-performance circles where the word “failure” is, as they say, the ultimate F-word. My ears are still ringing from coach diatribes about how much they HATE losing. HATE failure. As if yelling about it will scare it away.
My standard response? Failure doesn’t hate you, and hating it is a waste of time and emotional energy. Best to make peace with it unless you plan on playing it safe the rest of your career. Because anyone who is pushing their personal/professional boundaries to better themselves is flirting with failure at every turn. Fail fast, as they say, learn from every mistake, and get back up.
At the same time, if I had a nickel for every time some high achiever told me about how much more they learned from their failures than their successes, I’d be, let’s say, comfortably well-off.
But then…I had some success of my own. I won a big piece of business, and even better, it loved me back, leading to more business. Suddenly, people were coming to me asking How did you do it?
And while anyone who knows me knows I love to talk, I found it really awkward and even painful to talk about this success (notice how I dodged saying “my success?” This is how awkward I feel!).
To the point I literally gave myself a migraine. I was dubious about the cause-and-effect relationship in this instance until I talked to someone else who had a similar experience. Unpacking his success to a group, he, too, made himself sick.
All of which got me thinking. Everyone loves success, loves a winner, but does the mantle of success always sit comfortably? More importantly, are we anywhere as close to as discerning about what led to our success—and the role we played in it— as we are to understanding our failures?
The world is moving so, so fast. The sting of failure may be the one thing that forces many of us to take the time to pause and reflect on what just happened. Every sustained high achiever I know has mastered the art of self-reflection after failure. (Sometimes overly so, which is its own brand of pain.) Why do we do it? Because we do not want the pain of failure to ever happen again.
But success? Bring it on, baby! But unlike failure, there’s no self-reflection “traction” after success. Yay, nailed it, let’s hit the ground running for the next thing. Moreover, it can feel like a “rain on our parade” downer to turn around immediately after a success to poke holes into something we are still busy celebrating.
We know not to wallow in our successes, but do we learn from them? Do we reap the insights?
Conventional wisdom tells us that the best of the best (think Microsoft, NASA, and rugby’s All-Blacks) have tried and true debriefing processes after all endeavours, good and bad. At the same time, history is also riddled with examples where organisations drank too much of their good-news Kool-Aid post success and then inadvertently drove themselves into the ground.
Why is that? It turns out that humans are susceptible to a number of thinking fallacies that can actually hinder learning after success.
The first is what psychologists call fundamental attribution errors. When we succeed, we’re likely to conclude that our talents and strategy are the reasons. We also give short shrift to the part that environmental factors and random events may have played.
Interestingly, I observe the opposite-direction effect nearly as often – those self-deprecators who are more likely to attribute our successes to random factors and not us at all!
The second impediment is overconfidence bias: Success increases our self-assurance. Faith in ourselves is a good thing, of course, but too much of it can make us believe we don’t need to change anything. Just as it is important to be able to see beyond any failure to those aspects of that endeavour you can feel confident about, you don’t want to over-invest in confidence to the point that it blinds you to what can be done better.
The third impediment is called the failure-to-ask-why syndrome—the tendency not to investigate the causes of good performance systematically. This is when leaders and their teams don’t ask the tough questions that would help them expand their knowledge or alter their assumptions about how the world works.
So how can we “succeed” better?
Review our successes as we do our failures. Maybe wait a day or two to enjoy the success, but do it. Domains from the military to elite sport to business hold “after-action reviews” (AARs) to review the results of their exercises, competitions, and project launches, no matter the outcome. AAR participants meet to discuss four key questions: What did we set out to do? What actually happened? Why did it happen? What are we going to do next time?
An interesting and related side note is when success is bestowed upon us. Through no particular efforts of our own, we are nominated for and win an award. The winning feels great (heck, even the nomination is a pretty cool thing), but then what happens next? For most of us, the accolade goes into our CV as a symbol of our success and worth. And while it’s a great and visible piece of shorthand to show people, how many of us take the time to unpack why we won it?
Not doing this work is not only unfair to us, but potentially damaging. It’s the opposite of the overconfidence bias. When we can’t back up and fully own our part in the good things that are bestowed upon us, we are literally outsourcing (and therefore undermining) our confidence. If you don’t know why you won that award, ask those who bestowed it upon you. And listen to what they say. And practice making some version of their words (if you believe them to be true), your words.
Recognize that replication is not learning. Sure, there will be things worth repeating after every success…but if at the same time, we are not also seeking to change and improve, we are destined for eventual failure. At the same time, even if we think things are going really well, experimenting to test our thinking and assumptions keeps the learning alive.
I’m curious to know about your experience with success and how you handle it. Where have you gotten stuck, and what have you learned?
