Past Success: Your Best Asset or Your Downfall?
A successful career is something we all strive for. People feel more secure hiring a person with a proven track record of high performance. Leaders with strong reputations are scouted to turn around struggling teams. Past success is frequently used as a measuring stick for someone’s future potential. However, there is a danger that comes with past success, particularly in a complex environment — today’s environment. In a constantly changing world that requires experimentation and change, past success can make you more vulnerable to failure. This is because it makes you more likely to stick with a way of operating that no longer applies. This can mean disaster on an organizational level.
Let’s look at some the most common reasons for the failure of previously successful companies (according to Dartmouth professor at the Tuck School of Business Vijay Govindarajan):
- Big investments in legacy systems
- Strategic decisions based on today’s market rather than anticipating the future
- Fixation by leaders on what made them successful in the past
The above reasons all have one thing in common: they are human error. The top reasons aren’t about lack of resources or disasters outside of the control of an organization. Think about Kodak. They had the technology and the resources, but chose not to develop digital photography because leaders didn’t see the long-term value.
Most failures are the result of poor decision making, or more specifically, the inability to recognize a change when change is needed.
There’s a reason that successful people and organizations are more vulnerable to falling into this trap. To understand this better, let’s take a moment to look at a traditional model of learning.
Historically, we have thought of learning as happening in 4 stages:
- Unconscious incompetence: you don’t know what you don’t know
- Conscious incompetence: you know what you don’t know
- Conscious competence: you know, but you have to put effort into doing
- Unconscious competence: you know so well that doing is effortless
I’ll quickly go through the example of learning to tie shoelaces to demonstrate what these different stages feel like. When you’re a toddler you don’t even think about shoelaces. What are they? Who cares! You’ve got sweet velcro strapped kicks. You’re unconsciously incompetent. Then one day your big sister makes fun of your velcro straps, and suddenly you’re painfully aware you don’t know how to tie shoelaces. You’ve just entered the realm of conscious incompetence. Cue the anxiety. Your mom shows you how to tie shoelaces, but you struggle to do it on your own. With practice you start to get better, but there is still an amount of frustration and anxiety that comes with tying shoelaces in front of others. This is conscious competence. And here you are now as an adult. You probably haven’t actually thought about tying your shoelaces in years. Welcome to the beautiful world of unconscious competence.
Of course, in our respective fields, we all strive to climb our way into that last stage. You’ve made it as an expert when you can do something so well you don’t even need to think about it. You’ve finally learned how to effortlessly manage people, optimize your supply chain, or forecast next year’s earnings. What a wonderful feeling! You can be secure, confident, and satisfied with the success and skill you’ve acquired.
The catch is that if the environment is constantly changing — and on this one I think it’s safe to say we all agree — then it’s a natural consequence that skills that reaped success in the past don’t guarantee success in the future.
The problem is that once we’ve figured out a way that works really well, it’s hard for us to see the other options. We get distracted by characteristics of our environment that seem similar and fail to see the differences that warrant a new approach. If you’ve created a stellar organization using traditional hierarchical practices in a complicated environment, why would you throw that approach out the window now?
The environment today feels a lot like the past: it’s a large, hard to understand system with many interacting variables. On the surface level things seems the same. The difference is how those variables interact. In one system the outcomes of those interactions can be predicted, in one they can’t. This hard to perceive difference is what changes the requirements for success. It’s like confusing a screw with a nail. They’re both small, pointy, metal objects used to secure things, but a hammer only works on one of them.
On top of this, those emotions an individual in a stage of unconscious competence feels are the same emotions felt in a stage of unconscious incompetence. Essentially, an expert and a totally unaware person have the same feelings of confidence. This makes it even harder to recognize when your area of expertise or way of operating no longer applies to your current state.
Most people don’t ask a lot of questions when they are feeling successful. Often it’s not a deliberate effort, but not asking questions allows us to avoid acquiring information that might push us back into those stages of anxiety and frustration. Without questions it doesn’t matter if the information you need is right in front of you because you won’t realize it. This means you’re much more vulnerable to the types of poor decision making that lead to failure. A quote from Clay Christensen sums up eloquently why that is:
“Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question — you have to want to know — in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.” — Clay Christensen (as quoted by Jason Fried in What are Questions)
Past success can either be a valuable tool or an incredible barrier. We need to be able to understand the value of past experiences without allowing them to blind us from identifying the requirements of today. What questions should you be asking to make space for new answers?
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