The Counterintuitive Common Sense of Learning from Success

by Jonah Goldberg

“We rarely try to learn from success. We have investigative techniques only after we fail.”

Past successes are a drastically underutilized source of learning. Every organization has professionals with tacit knowledge gained from years of experience, but this knowledge is rarely passed on to others or translated into training new professionals. 

Shouldn’t there be a way to make this acquired wisdom overt and usable for everyone?

This is the belief of the Service for Learning from Success and Ongoing Learning in Human Service Organizations (LFS Service) at the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, the only research unit of its kind. The LFS Service has cooperated with dozens of organizations in Israel and abroad, including the Ministry of Education and the Israel Defense Forces, helping them to continuously improve.

Here we’ll dive into the process of Learning from Success and how to implement the strategies in your organization and personal career.

Open Mindset

Evaluating one’s own successes tends to be a difficult but ultimately incredibly rewarding change in mindset. Irit Aizik, a researcher for the LFS service, finds that, in nearly every organization she has worked with, staff members misattribute their success to factors such as luck and intuition. They are often shocked at how much they have actually accomplished in their roles, which changes the tone of meetings into one where members feel more positive and are encouraged to improve further.

This shift in attitude may be the most lasting benefit of the LFS system. When the conversation around issues in the organization begins with what your employees are doing right, nobody feels that they are blamed. And this motivates everyone to bring up issues they would otherwise try to keep hidden, as well as be more cooperative and accept criticism.

How do we start the conversation around successes in order to reach this point?

Specificity

The most crucial piece of LFS is nailing down specific positive choices. Here numbers such as sales can often get in the way, as the results alone do not point to which strategy, system, or pattern created organizational improvement. When Irit prepared a report for the National Program for Children and Youth at Risk in Bedouin Society, which operated under multiple Israeli government ministries and over an entire region of the country, she narrowed down her evaluation to only three success stories. Certainly, the program had more accomplishments to speak of, but it is best to deeply analyze the strongest examples of insightful practices that--as we’ll discuss shortly--can then be spread across the entire organization.

In the search for best practices, cast your net everywhere, but don’t waste strength pulling up anything beyond the biggest fish. The best leverage points you find will help the other effective people and systems become more successful as you continue growing.

Once you have identified your successes, note the area of the organization each is particularly relevant to. Then clearly outline the success in terms of “before” and “after.” This will show exactly how the strategy strengthened your organization, and identify any negative effects that can be smoothed out of an otherwise beneficial practice.

Actions

In order to glean every piece of useful information from a success, the focus needs to be on actions. When trying to identify what works in an organization, it is all too easy to turn to statements of values or buzzwords--“we are committed to excellence,” or “we are successful because of our group cohesion.”

Irit remarks that her interviews often need to take the shape of “how loops”--just as children might incessantly ask “why?”, it is important to keep asking “how” until concrete actions reveal themselves. This played out in an MJB partnership with eight schools implementing a Green Learning Space program. Schools attributed the program’s success to the enthusiasm of the teachers, but the heart of the accomplishment was how that enthusiasm manifested: the teachers participated in extensive training, recruited other staff, and involved parents and students in deliberations about the school’s garden.

Following multiple interviews centered around specific actions, the final step of LFS is developing Principles of Action. While these do not have to culminate in the formal reports that MJB creates for its partners, it is vital to see what common elements underlie your chosen successes, and disseminate that list of actions within the organization. Irit has also found that workshops are most helpful in implementing better practices, as asking staff members to go through the motions once allows them to form new habits more seamlessly.

Turning tacit knowledge into Principles of Action is why MJB’s list of LFS partnerships includes the Israel Defense Forces and the entire city of Qalansuwa. Unearthing the concrete practices that make parts of your organization successful, through identifying specific success stories and honing in on the actions that enabled them, allow the rest of your staff to learn from them, and foster a mindset for continued growth and success.