Failure can be the best teacher, but if you’re not careful, you might take away the wrong lessons. How can you make sure you’re getting accurate, actionable insight from your team’s past experiences? The key is to analyze failures alongside successes instead of concentrating only on what didn’t work. Here are three reasons why this is important.
First, if you’re only looking at what conditions and actions led to a failure, you might invest in interventions that won’t solve the problem. For example, if you dig into why 25% of your sales team doesn’t meet their quotas, you may find that those employees aren’t using a particular tool, leading you to conclude that they need training on the tool. But if you analyze the rest of the team’s success, you may find that they’re not using the tool either, meaning a different issue is at play for that 25%. Second, a single-minded focus on what led to a negative outcome could lead you to miss the strategies that led to a positive outcome. For example, if you only analyze the 25% of employees who were unsuccessful, you’ll miss the fact that the successful 75% routinely prepare for important sales calls a week in advance. Third, good outcomes aren’t necessarily the result of good processes. By assessing both the successful and unsuccessful groups of sales employees, for example, you may discover that the ones who are meeting their quotas are inflating their numbers or taking unnecessary risks.
This tip is adapted from “Don’t Learn the Wrong Lessons from Failure,” by Emre Soyer and Robin M. Hogarth
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