Success Can Set Us Up to Fail
Another pre-publication look inside: Leadership from The Mission Control Room to the Boardroom
From Chapter 13: Tips and Challenges
Nothing builds confidence like success. The tougher the problems and the more of them we solve, the greater our confidence becomes. As our team racks up success after success, we understandably develop a strong can-do attitude, both as individuals and as a team. Ironically, our continued success can make us overconfident and weaken the integrity in our decision-making.
With the confidence born of success comes a risk of arrogance that is a step beyond overconfidence. It is an air of superiority that can be charitably described as a “not invented here” mindset. We often come by this attitude honestly, as industry leaders or strong performers in difficult fields, and it is typified by comments like, “Hey, we invented this business. Who do you think you are to tell us anything?”
While it may be grounded in an organization’s history and success, this “logic” serves only to put up walls that prevent us from hearing anyone else’s good ideas, including those whose help we need and others who we could help. As the “not invented here” mindset grows, outside organizations stop trying to get through to us, and our people stop looking for answers from the larger community. It is a recipe for falling into stovepipes and limited thinking, and the same mindset that led to NASA’s human spaceflight accidents.
After talking about this with a team of executives from a global data and software company, I was asked, “What if your organization is always successful? How do you get people’s attention to these values and practices when the risk of failure is considered non-existent, and the expectation is that we just can’t fail?”
What company or organization in history just can’t fail? What company has a better reputation, and whose greatest accomplishments are better known than NASA’s, especially the human spaceflight accomplishments? Our well-earned reputation is that we can’t fail either. We do incredible work and make it look easy. And yet… we have failed our astronauts three times. (For a longer list and discussion about companies who “could not fail” but did, read Jim Collins’s How the Mighty Fall.)
If you think your organization is immune to failing or needs only its own counsel, be afraid. Failure is out there waiting. We aren’t always as smart as we think we are, and the narrow vision that accompanies this kind of arrogance is a sure way to wander into otherwise avoidable failure rather than stepping deliberately around it to achievement and innovation.