What does it mean that reflection on successes too?

Understanding what you did right is as valuable as understanding what went wrong.

Example: A product team ships a feature that exceeds every adoption metric by a factor of three. In the sprint retrospective, the facilitator says "Great work, moving on" and spends forty-five minutes dissecting the two bugs that slipped through QA. Six months later, the team ships another feature — but this one lands flat. Nobody can explain why the first feature succeeded because nobody studied it. The conditions that produced the hit were never identified, never documented, never deliberately reproduced. The team treated the success as a gift and the failure as a lesson. They learned from the failure and wasted the success. A different team across the hall runs a success review on their best quarter. They discover three specific patterns: the project had a single clear owner with decision authority, the customer research happened before the spec rather than after, and the launch included a two-week soft rollout that generated early feedback. None of these patterns were company policy. They were choices this team made, and until the success review surfaced them, even the team members who made those choices could not have articulated why they mattered. The success review converted tacit luck into explicit strategy. Within a year, those three patterns became the team s default operating procedure — not because management mandated them, but because the team understood why they worked.

Try this: Identify one clear success from the past three months — a project that went well, a goal you hit, a situation you handled effectively. Conduct a structured success review using these five questions: (1) What specifically went right? List at least five concrete factors, not just "I worked hard." Push past surface explanations to structural ones — what decisions, conditions, preparation, timing, relationships, or habits contributed? (2) Which of these factors were deliberate choices versus fortunate circumstances? For each deliberate choice, document the reasoning behind it so you can replicate it. For each fortunate circumstance, ask whether you can engineer that circumstance in the future. (3) What did you almost do differently, and how would that have changed the outcome? This question reveals the decision points that mattered most. (4) What skills, knowledge, or relationships made this success possible? These are your leverage points — the assets that produced outsized returns. (5) What is the one replicable pattern from this success that you want to install as a default in your future work? Write a one-sentence principle that captures it. Time: 30-45 minutes. The output should be a document you can reference the next time you are planning a similar endeavor.