Learning from Failure

I’d never bought a copy of the Harvard Business Review, until yesterday.  I love it as a resource, because it contains academically sound articles that executives actually read.  In the UK it’s £15.95 an issue.  I do get free online access via the university, but with a bit of a time lag. So I decided this would be an investment. It’s the “Failure” issue.  (I know it’s ‘last month’ for the US – but it’s the the one in the shops here in the UK!)

One of the books I’m currently reading is Jim Collins’ How the Mighty Fall.  As he says, sometimes you learn more about what makes something resilient when you can work out how to kill it.   And even more if you can learn how to spot when it’s in the first throes of decline.  But, of the many articles I’m finding useful in my beloved HBR, one that’s struck me is about how we can fail to analyse data from success (see page 68, “Why Don’t Leaders Learn from Success?“.

The case study that I liked reading about was Ducati.  They were so good at analysing motoGP data in their ‘trial’ (first) season that they came second.  Instead of winning the next year they dropped a place.  The author says it’s because they weren’t good at analysing the data on why they were winning; they just looked for where they could improve.   Jim Collins argues the opposite as the premise of his book: that our tendency is to analyse succcess and not learn from failure.

I wonder if a third point might be worthy of consideration.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing: when we know something has failed we can point to why we think that was.  When looking at success we can usually spot things we think contributed to that.  But my question is, do we ever actually know what made the thing work?  Isn’t it usually a combination of factors rather than one thing?  Or am I seeing complexity where I should be looking for simplicity?

Who knows.  But i think it’s a really interesting HBR issue for anyone interested in resilience.

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