Are you learning from your losses?

Strategic leaders pause and reflect before pushing ahead to the next thing.

→ This is the fourth in a 5-part series on building learning organizations. Read Part 1 here. Read Part 3 here.←

THINK ON IT: Are you learning from your losses? 

Last week, I wrote about mining your wins in order to build a truly distinctive business. The same is true for learning from your losses: if you routinely skip past the postmortem to focus on what’s next, you’re missing out on valuable information. 

And I’m not just talking about losses in sales, although those might be the first that come to mind. Any time reality doesn’t match your expectations is a good time to pause and inquire before pushing ahead. 

Leaders are often tempted to take one of two paths following a loss: 

1. They move past the loss as quickly as possible so as not to dwell on it, losing out on the chance to learn from it. 

2. They dwell on the loss to the point where they create even more loss, choosing to assign blame for any conceivable problems rather than learn from what happened to inform their future. 

Strategic leaders take neither path; instead they recognize what really happened – the reality of the situation – and then use what they observe to create a learning-centric postmortem process. 

You have losses in your business. Are you pausing long enough to let them teach you? 

Premium Members, read on for ways to instill learning from losses in your organization. (Become a Premium Member. Paid subscribers get access to nearly 100 tools and how-tos on implementing strategic topics, including a 7-part series to help leaders build their own strategic capacity.)

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” — Bill Gates

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