Learning from Success and Failure

Learning from Success and Failure

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Posted by Bob Sutton on June 4, 2007 4:02 PM

One of the mottoes that Diego Rodriguez and I use at the Stanford d.school is “failure sucks, but instructs.” We encourage students to learn from the constant stream of small setbacks and successes that are produced by doing things (rather than just talking about what to do). To paraphrase our d.school founder and inspiration David Kelley: “If you keep making the same mistakes again and again, you aren’t learning anything. If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you are doing new things and learning new things.”

Although the concept of failing forward is widely discussed and makes sense, it has been the subject of limited academic research to date. But some cool stuff is coming out now. An especially interesting pair of studies has been published during the last couple of years in Journal of Applied Psychology by Shmuel Ellis from Tel Aviv University. There have been quite a number of case studies of the after event or after action reviews that are used in the U.S. Army after training exercises, and have now been extended to a variety of settings, ranging from firefighting to corporate actions such as mergers and layoffs. The basic idea is, as soon as feasible after some action occurs, a facilitator and/or teacher should have a conversation with the key participants about what went right, what went wrong, and what could be done better next time. Harvard's David Garvin talks extensively about after action reviews in his book Learning in Action: A Guide to Putting the Learning Organization to Work and presents some compelling cases and arguments about their effectiveness.

Shmuel Ellis and his colleagues have really dug into this issue with, first, a field experiment with two companies of soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces, who were tested for their performance on navigation exercises. The critical difference between the two groups was that -- following standard practice in the Israeli military -- the first company had a series of after event reviews during four days of navigation exercises that focused only on the mistakes that soldiers made, and how to correct them. The second company, in its after event discussions, focused on what could be learned from both their successes and failures.

Then, two months later, these same two companies went through two days of navigation exercises. The results showed that, although substantial learning occurred in both groups:

1. Soldiers who discussed both successes and failures learned at higher rates than soldiers who discussed just failures.

2. Soldiers in the group that discussed both successes and failures appeared to learn faster because they developed “richer mental models” of their experiences than soldiers who only discussed failures.

This study, earlier research, and a subsequent controlled experiment by Ellis and his colleagues show that experiencing failure does lead to more richer mental models than experiencing success. Consider some interesting twists from their more controlled laboratory experiments of after event reviews:

1. After people succeed at a task, they learn the most when they think about what went wrong.

2. After people fail on a task, it doesn’t matter whether they focus on successes or failures. They will learn so long as they do an after event review.

These are, of course, just two studies, but they have several interesting implications for management, assuming that the findings can be generalized to other settings:

1. After event reviews -- whether focused on failure alone or both successes and failures -- spark learning. Sure, you already knew that -- but it amazes me how many companies don’t have time to stop and think about what they learned, but seem to have the time to keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

2. After people succeed at something, it is especially important to have them focus on what things went wrong. They learn more than if they just focus on success (so, don’t just gloat and congratulate yourself about what you did right; focus on what could go even better next time).

3. When failure happens, the most important thing is to have an after event review to provoke sufficiently deep thinking -- whether you talk about successes or failures is less important.

Finally, Cisco is a great example of a company that successfully applies after event reviews. I have been especially impressed by -- and written about -- how they take time to do systematic reviews after each merger (and use other evidence-based practices), which may help explain why their acquisitions succeed at a far higher rate than most firms. To paraphrase David Kelley again, this means they make new and different mistakes in each subsequent merger.