4/5 Free Articles leftRemaining  Why Leaders Don’t Learn from
Success  From the April 2011 Issue Why Leaders Don’t Learn from
Success  View more from the   The Idea in Brief    1. When we
succeed, we tend to give too much credit to our talents and our
model or strategy and too little to external factors and luck.
2. Success can make us so overconfident that we believe we don’t
need to change anything.  3. We have a tendency not to
investigate the causes of good performance.  Recognizing that
these impediments exist is a big first step in overcoming them.
Some basic practices also can help: systematic after-action
reviews, tools like Six Sigma, and experiments that test
assumptions about what is needed to achieve great performance.
The third impediment is the failure-to-ask-why syndrome—the
tendency not to investigate the causes of good performance
systematically. When executives and their teams suffer from this
syndrome, they don’t ask the tough questions that would help
them expand their knowledge or a