Success as a Lousy Teacher
Success can conceal mistakes and encourage people to treat warning signs as normal. Varol uses NASA’s Challenger and Columbia disasters to argue for examining near misses, reviewing decisions with the information available at the time, and continuing to question successful practices.
THE IDEA
Why Success Is a Lousy Teacher
A successful outcome does not show that every part of the decision was sound. Luck may have concealed a mistake, or a risky practice may not yet have caused harm. As Bill Gates puts it, success is “a lousy teacher” because it “seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” Varol cites research in which financial analysts became overconfident and less accurate after a run of better-than-average forecasts.
Varol recommends treating successful projects as works in progress. His sporting examples include Maurice Greene training as though he were number two and Bo Jackson judging a home run against his own standard of execution. Mia Hamm captures the attitude: “Many people say I’m the best… I don’t think so. And because of that, someday I just might be.”
Near misses deserve attention even when the final outcome is good. In Varol’s account of NASA, repeated launches with O-ring damage or foam shedding helped make those anomalies seem acceptable. Investigating them could reveal weaknesses before a disaster. The Challenger and Columbia cases also show why replacing a failed component may leave organizational pressures and decision habits unchanged.
Reviewing a decision requires considering what people knew at the time. Varol uses the Carter Racing case, based on the Challenger launch decision, to illustrate how people can choose the risky option when they do not know the eventual outcome. An outcome can be evidence about a decision without making its quality obvious in hindsight.
A premortem asks “What went wrong?” about an imagined future failure before committing to a plan. Varol cites a 30% improvement in identifying reasons for failure. The practical task is to name plausible failure paths, assess their likelihood and consequences, and decide what to change.
Safety measures can also change behavior. Varol discusses a study of German taxis with ABS brakes in which drivers reportedly compensated by taking more risks. The question is whether a particular protection changes behavior enough to offset some of its benefit, rather than assuming that every safety measure backfires.
Varol’s Day 1 framing asks people to keep examining successful work: what remains uncertain, which warnings were dismissed, and what would justify changing the approach?
When to use it
After a series of successful product launches, a company becomes complacent and stops testing rigorously, leading to a major quality failure.
A professional athlete who has won multiple championships starts training less and relying on past success, resulting in a decline in performance.
A manager uses a premortem before a critical project to identify potential pitfalls and improve the plan.
An organization implements a new safety protocol, but employees become more reckless, trusting the protocol to protect them, so the overall risk level remains unchanged.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Challenger Disaster
NASA repeatedly launched space shuttles despite O-ring damage. Each success normalized the anomaly, leading to a catastrophic failure when cold weather made the O-rings brittle. Engineers' warnings were overruled because previous successes had built overconfidence.
Columbia Disaster
Foam shedding from the external tank was accepted as routine after many successful launches. A foam strike during launch caused a hole in the wing, leading to disintegration during reentry. Management dismissed engineers' concerns as 'foamology'.
Netflix Reinvention
Varol describes Reed Hastings’s concern that Netflix’s success with DVDs could obstruct its move to streaming. He presents the transition as an example of questioning a successful business model before circumstances make it untenable.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
Think of a recent success you experienced. What role did luck play? What warning signs did you ignore that could have led to a different outcome?
Identify a project or goal you are currently pursuing. Conduct a premortem: assume it fails in one year, and list the top three reasons why. How can you mitigate those risks now?
Consider a safety measure you rely on (e.g., a backup system, a checklist, an extension). How might that make you take more risks? What would you do differently if that safety net didn't exist?
Often confused with
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Think Like A Rocket Scientist (Ozan Varol)