What Success Has to Teach Us

By Jason Hall

When something goes particularly well, the outcome tends to get remembered. The project succeeded. The problem was solved. A difficult conversation led somewhere useful. People are pleased, perhaps relieved, and there is usually something else waiting for their attention.

The circumstances fade more quickly. Who was involved? What did they need from one another? Was there enough time to think? What allowed people to work through something they had struggled with before?

Good outcomes rarely have a single cause, but understanding what contributed to those outcomes can make them easier to repeat.

In workplace conversations, difficulties are often easy to describe. People can tell you where they’re interrupted, what takes too long, or which meetings are hard to accommodate. I’ve also found it useful to ask about a recent moment when the work went particularly well.

As people describe it, the circumstances come into view. A team had somewhere to leave its work in progress, so each conversation could begin where the last one ended. Two colleagues could resolve questions as they arose. People could move easily between working together and concentrating on their own.

A successful outcome alone tells us little about how the workplace supported the effort. People may have worked around considerable obstacles. They may also have benefited from conditions that helped them along.

That’s why I keep returning to a simple question: What are we making easy?

Where and how people work affects who they encounter, what they can keep in view, and whether they can stay with a problem long enough to make progress. Asking about a success helps bring those relationships into focus. A general desire for better collaboration becomes more useful when people can describe what they needed to accomplish together and what helped them do it.

Those conversations can also reveal differences across the workplace. Perhaps a useful arrangement exists for only one team. Perhaps a place considered incidental is supporting work no one anticipated. Understanding its contribution can inform decisions about what to preserve or make available elsewhere.

There’s a temptation to turn success into a formula. Repeating an arrangement won’t necessarily reproduce the result; the people, the task, and their relationships are part of it. But understanding what helped gives workplace decisions a firmer basis.

When something goes well, it’s worth pausing before moving on. Alongside the accomplishment, there may be something to understand about what made it easier.