“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;”
— Rudyard Kipling, If—
When something important goes wrong, investigation follows almost automatically.
A system fails. A project overruns. A product launch collapses. A patient suffers an unexpected outcome.
We reconstruct events, build timelines, look for contributing factors and ask what needs to change.
We do this because failure is not self-explanatory.
The fact that something failed tells us almost nothing about why it failed.
Yet when something succeeds, our standards are often much lower. The result is that organizations often learn more from their failures than from their successes, even when success contains equally valuable information.
We congratulate the people involved, perhaps write up a few lessons learned, and move on.
That feels like a missed opportunity.
Success creates evidence
Consider the first successful product in a new product line.
It may have worked exactly as intended. Nothing spectacular happened. But before that point there was uncertainty.
The design might not have worked. Manufacturing might have struggled. Customers might have rejected it. A supplier might have failed. An assumption that looked sensible six months earlier might have proved wrong.
Success has therefore created evidence.
The same applies when a company introduces a new tool, adopts a new process, enters a new market or attempts something materially different from what it has done before.
The outcome may be entirely ordinary.
The learning opportunity may not be.
The important distinction is this:
Success does not automatically create learning. It creates evidence. Learning happens only if we examine that evidence.
We demand more from explanations of failure
Suppose a major project fails and somebody explains that the team “wasn’t sufficiently committed”.
Most serious organizations would reject that as inadequate.
They would want to know what happened, when things began to diverge from expectation, which assumptions failed, which decisions mattered and what evidence was available at the time.
Now compare that with the explanations routinely offered after success.
The team was excellent. Leadership had vision. People were empowered. Everyone stayed close to the customer.
Those things may all be true.
But they are not yet causal explanations.
We often accept explanations of success that we would never accept in a serious investigation of failure.
Once we know that something worked, it becomes very easy to construct a convincing story about why.
That is where the danger begins.
Cargo-cult success
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
— Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science
There is a familiar metaphor for copying the visible trappings of something without understanding what actually makes it work: the cargo cult.
Organizations can do something similar with success.
A successful project used daily stand-ups, so daily stand-ups become mandatory.
A successful company had an open-plan office, unusual hiring practices or a charismatic founder, so others imitate those features.
A product succeeded while following a particular development process, and the process becomes “best practice”.
Perhaps those things mattered.
Perhaps they did not.
They may have been causes, enabling conditions, incidental details or simply things that happened to coexist with success.
If we do not distinguish between them, we risk carefully reproducing the trappings while losing the mechanism.
The wrong lesson from success can be more dangerous than an obvious mistake because it still feels like learning.
Which successes deserve investigation?
Clearly, not every successful outcome needs a formal review.
Routine success may tell us very little that is new.
The interesting cases are those where success contains unusually valuable information.
Novelty matters. So does uncertainty. Risk matters. Surprise matters.
The first product in a new family may be worth studying even if it performs exactly as expected.
A new process that works first time may be worth studying because nobody previously knew whether it would.
A team that performs dramatically better than comparable teams is worth understanding because the difference itself contains information.
This is particularly true where organizations are experimenting with new technologies, new business models, or new ways of working. Success under unfamiliar conditions may reveal capabilities and advantages that were not fully understood beforehand.
So the trigger is not “exceptional success”.
It is closer to this:
Was there enough novelty, uncertainty, risk or surprise in the successful outcome that understanding why it worked could materially improve what happens next?
If so, the success deserves more than celebration.
“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts…” — Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
A counterpart to the postmortem
I’ll use the coined term peri-vivum for this: an examination of something that is alive and working, intended to understand why.
The term is intentionally a little playful: a counterpart to the postmortem, but applied to something that is very much alive and working.
A peri-vivum would not be a congratulatory retrospective.
It would treat success as something worthy of investigation.
That might mean reconstructing the timeline, examining assumptions, looking at external factors, separating deliberate actions from favorable circumstances, and identifying mistakes that the successful outcome happened to survive.
Root cause analysis may have a role, though the idea of a single root cause is probably too simple for most successes. Causal analysis, comparison and counterfactual thinking may prove more useful.
The important point is not the method, at least not yet.
It is the mindset.
Success should not be treated as though its explanation is obvious simply because the outcome was good.
From celebration to learning
We already know that failure deserves investigation.
Perhaps success sometimes does too.
Not because every good outcome needs to be analyzed, and not because we should turn achievement into another bureaucratic process.
But because some successes contain knowledge that will otherwise disappear.
Failure gets studied because we know that bad outcomes are not self-explanatory.
Success deserves exactly the same intellectual discipline.
If a failure is important enough to investigate because we did not expect it, a success may be worth investigating whenever we were not entitled to assume it.
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