Tom Rath goes to length in his book 'How full is your bucket' to build the case for learning from our success not our failure. In his research those that took encouragement from and built on their existing success far outperformed those that were focused on failures. He went on to identify this phenomena in many walks of life. Often sports teams would celebrate success but look to learn from failures. When it went wrong they would run the footage and analyse the game in detail. When they won they would visit the bar and celebrate together. However the most successful teams did the reverse drowning their sorrows when they failed, but analysing the game when they won. In another example children that do well in school exams were frequently offspring of parents who focus on the A score when a child comes home with an A two B's and an C. This is something of a play on the old carrot verses stick argument - but in a world that has proven many times that the carrot keeps winning.
There are in fact limits to the carrots power and it is true that the stick does work on occasions, but if Tom Rath's research is to be believed then the ratio that works is something like 5 carrots being needed to 1 stick.
So yes we should learn from our failures, but we should learn much more from our successes. This seems especially relevant in the area of informal, or on the job learning. We do well to create vehicles that share success within our businesses, especially those successes that others can replicate and take advantage of. For example a retail business relies on the success of its sales staff, So being able to share what worked well on the shop floor today, allows staff to adapt their customer approach tomorrow. Imagine on a daily basis taking the highest performing staff members and sharing their own recipes for success with the rest of the staff, that's a potential game changer. The same could be said of a managerial scenario, an operational scenario, or any other scenario. If success is shared then others will learn what they must do to succeed as well.
This is not hard to facilitate, although social media tools can help (watch this space thisworkedwell.com). You can also follow our new twitter feed @thisworkedwell.
Work at sharing success in your organisation on constant basis and the research tells us you will begin create high performance on a wider and deeper scale. Now that's really bringing informal learning to life.
