Investigating Success: A Fresh Perspective on Learning from What Goes Right
Investigating Success
In the world of safety and organizational performance, we've long been fixated on investigating failures, incidents, and near-misses. While these investigations are undoubtedly valuable, they tell only half the story. What if we turned our analytical lens toward success instead?
The concept of investigating success isn't about celebrating wins – it's about understanding the complex adaptations, decisions, and systemic factors that enable teams to succeed despite challenges. When we examine success through the Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) framework, we uncover rich insights about resilience, adaptation, and the true nature of work.
Why Success Deserves Our Attention
Success in complex systems isn't merely the absence of failure. Every day, workers navigate ambiguous situations, balance competing priorities, and make countless micro-adjustments to achieve their goals. These adaptations often go unnoticed precisely because they work so well. By investigating success, we can understand how people create safety and reliability in real-world conditions.
Consider a busy hospital emergency department that consistently provides excellent care despite unpredictable patient loads, resource constraints, and high-stakes decisions. The traditional approach might focus on medical errors or near-misses. But what about the countless shifts where everything goes right? What enables the team to coordinate effectively, prioritize appropriately, and maintain quality care under pressure?
Moving Beyond "Best Practices"
When we investigate success, we often discover that reality differs from documented procedures. Workers develop informal practices, unwritten rules, and collective knowledge that help them navigate complexity. Instead of viewing these adaptations as deviations, we can see them as valuable innovations that emerge from practical experience.
These adaptations aren't reckless—they're thoughtful responses to the gap between work as imagined and work as done. By understanding these adaptations, organizations can better support their workers and design systems that as natural variability.
Methods for Investigating Success
Investigating success requires different tools than incident investigation. Here are some practical approaches:
“Learning Team” sessions focused on successful outcomes can reveal the invisible work that makes things go right. Instead of asking, "What went wrong?" We ask, "How did you make this work?" This shift in perspective often uncovers valuable insights about coordination, communication, and problem-solving.
Direct observation of normal work, combined with respectful inquiry, helps us understand the subtle ways people adapt to challenges. These observations work best when conducted collaboratively, with workers as partners in understanding their own expertise.
Success mapping can identify the conditions, resources, and relationships that enable good outcomes. This includes examining both formal systems and informal networks that people rely on to get work done.
Barrier Analysis can offer comprehensive strategies for how defense-in-depth works and provide whether or not systems are “brittle.”
From Investigation to Action
The goal of investigating success isn't just to understand – it's to enhance organizational performance. Insights from success investigations (not sure if that is a new term or not) can inform:
System design: Understanding how people successfully navigate complexity can help us design better tools, procedures, and support systems.
Training and development: Success investigations reveal the actual skills and knowledge workers need, which may differ from formal job descriptions.
Resource allocation: By understanding what enables success, organizations can better invest in the capabilities that matter most.
The Path Forward
As the field of Human and Organizational Performance continues to evolve, investigating success should become as routine as investigating failure. This balanced approach helps us understand work in its full context – not just what goes wrong but how things go right.
The next time your team achieves its goals despite challenges, consider investigating its success. The insights you gain might be just as valuable as any lesson learned from failure. After all, success leaves clues—we just need to learn how to look for them.
In the end, investigating success isn't about creating a catalog of "best practices" to be rigidly followed. It's about understanding and supporting the conditions that enable people to perform well in complex, dynamic environments. By learning from what goes right, we can build more resilient organizations that better serve both workers and stakeholders.