With all my book writing, it’s been hard to keep up with my reading, but I want to point out the excellent issue of Harvard Business Review from April of this year on failure. Not surprisingly, most of the articles about failure have a common theme: learning. That’s the real value in failure–being able to learn from it.

But I was also interested in an article by Gino and Pisano about learning from success. Interestingly (since we all aspire for success, of course), it’s hard to learn from success. The problem is, when we succeed we tend not to invest the time in understanding why. We tend to attribute it to how great we are. This ultimately comes back to the basic process of learning.

According to Gino and Pisano, “Learning is the process of updating our theories.” I really like this phrase. Whether we recognize it or not, we walk around our work worlds with a host of theories swimming around in our heads. Some may be formal theories backed by a field of research, but many are just informal understandings of why things happen. Learning means we have an awareness of a particular theory and are able to update it–make it better–based on our experience or reflection.

So here’s the problem with success: it doesn’t cause us to update our theories, because the theory worked, right? Not so fast. I know it is convenient to attribute success in your project to how awesome you are, but I think that is much LESS often the case than we think it is. I look at a lot of successful organizations and I’m not sure most of their success isn’t attributable to blind luck. What we need to do is make those theories in our heads about why our organizations succeed and actually make them explicit. I think the theories that most of us have in our head when it comes to running organizations are extremely weak. So when we have success, it doesn’t mean our theory is proved correct–it just means it wasn’t proved wrong. Successes (as Gino and Pisano argue) need to be studied just as carefully as we tend to study failures with the goal of illuminating the holes in our theories so we can improve them. This is learning.

In our upcoming book Humanize, Maddie and I have an entire chapter on how organizations can be courageous, and the section on culture talks about learning, while the section on process talks about experimentation. So obviously we think this stuff is important too. Learning is central to human organizations, and that requires ways of doing things that are not currently in our “best practice” box. It means spending time figuring out what our theories are, even if some of them are half-baked. It means toning down our egos sometimes. It means building our capacity to have smarter conversations.

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