Look Back, Celebrate, and Learn

“Work harder. And if working harder doesn’t work, work harder.”

That’s the default way people run businesses and organizations. And they do it 24/7/365, never stopping to:

• Take a breath;
• Look back at the path behind them;
• Celebrate how far they’ve come; and
• Learn from their recent experiences that maybe, just maybe, there’s a way to work smarter and not harder.

Lots of people look back

Athletes look back. They call it watching the game tape.

Military personnel look back. They call it an after-action review.

Software engineers look back. After a project or a specific phase of development is completed, a team often holds a retrospective meeting to reflect on what went well, what could have been improved, and how to apply these lessons to future projects.

Celebrate success, or get stuck in The Gap

Many people running businesses and organizations also don’t celebrate success. No matter how impressive the victory in the past 90 days, no matter how high the summit they just reached, they just march right into the next 90 days and work harder.?

These people fall into The Gap: The ever-increasing, well, gap between where they are today and their ever-expanding concept of where they could be. High-achieving people are most prone to this, because they achieve a lot and move the goalposts on themselves. It’s like running toward the horizon; no matter how much faster you go, you’re never going to get there.

Instead, stay in The Gain by always looking back 90 days and celebrating the tremendous gains you and the organization have made in the past 90 days.

Staying in The Gain makes you happy. Falling in The Gap makes you sad. To learn more, read or listen to The Gap and the Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy.

How to celebrate and look back

I recommend celebrating achievements first, then looking for lessons learned, every 90 days. For help, use the thinking prompts on the next page.

Celebration Questions

Add “in the last 90 days” to each of these questions to keep your look back manageable.?

1. What do we need to celebrate?
2. Who’s the most improved person on your team? How did they improve?
3. Who should win this quarter’s Core Values Award? Why?
4. What worked in the business?
5. What is one thing you solved this quarter that wasn’t a known problem?
6. What were the biggest gains you saw in each aspect of the organization? (Start with People, Purpose, Playbooks, Performance, and either Profit or Operating Margin.)
7. What gave you the biggest feeling of:Excitement?Accomplishment?Progress?Pride?Confidence?
8. What’s the best thing that happened to you?
9. What was your biggest people move? Your biggest strategic move?
10. “What you focus on expands.” What’s something you focused on, which merits celebration?
11. What are we capable of doing now that we were not previously?

Lessons Learned Questions

Add “in the last 90 days” to each of these questions to keep your look back manageable.?

1. What was your best lesson?
2. What did not work in the business?
3. If you had a “do over,” what would you have done differently?
4. What was our Rock completion rate?If 80% or higher: How did we do so well?If less than 80%: How can we improve our completion rate next quarter?
5. What people topics arose? Who showed they were not the Right Person in the Right Seat doing the Right Things Right?
6. What were the biggest gaps you saw in each aspect of the organization? (Start with People, Purpose, Playbooks, Performance, and either Profit or Operating Margin.)
7. What gave you the biggest feeling of:Indifference?Failure?Going backward?Shame?Hesitation?
8. What went wrong with customer experience?
9. What went wrong with employee experience?

Image Credit: DALL-E via ChatGPT4. Prompt: "Please create a 1920x1080 pixels image of a business owner who has climbed halfway up a mountain, and is looking back at how far he has come and celebrating his progress."