You probably know the expression “never change a winning team“. Often, success feels like magic because we don’t really know or understand its ingredients. Changing the ingredients may jeopardize success. Hence, the soccer quote by Sir Alf Ramsey (1920-1999).
An 2011 article in Harvard Business Review came to similar conclusion: Why Leaders Don’t Learn from Success. HBR: “We all know that learning from failure is one of the most important capacities for people and companies to develop. Yet surprisingly, learning from success can present even greater challenges.”
The 2011 HBR article mentions three reasons:
- fundamental attribution errors: is it really our “talents and our current model or strategy”?;
- overconfidence bias: “success increases our self-assurance”;
- failure-to-ask-why syndrome: “the tendency not to investigate the causes”.
A personal example: with almost 700,000 pageviews my blog appears successful. Yet, I do not ask money and items that are free are often deemed to be worthless. Moreover, many of my subjects are tough to read and/or understand. So, why is my blog successful?
I think, feel and believe that I provide something that is useful because it was useful to me in the first place. I suppose it’s (ultimately) about learning and teaching. Hence, my blog label below. I do my utmost to stay away from giving you my opinions. As Clint Eastwood‘s character Dirty Harry Callahan once stated: “Well, opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one.”
It might be a coincidence but my blogs often deal with the Why question. Also see HBR #3 above. The other five main questions in life are usually of less interest to me: How, What, When, Where and Who. These other 5 reasons are often just derivatives of Why.
The cause for failure seems easier to understand. However, failure and success are both the result of a cascading rather than a single effect. It’s nearly impossible finding more than a few ingredients – let alone all.
Usually, there is one big difference in our analysis: failure = accountability (eg, blame), while success = responsibility (eg, risk-reward). See my blogs on accountability & responsibility and risk-reward.
A simple answer to the question in this blog title is this: we need to learn, but we neither want to learn, nor believe that we can learn from our successes. We very well know that those findings could hurt our ego.
You’re So Vain (1972) by Carly Simon
artist, lyrics, video, Wiki-1, Wiki-2
Note: all markings (bold, italic, underlining) by LO unless stated otherwise.
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