Don’t Neglect Unexpected Success: Look for Bright Spots, Champions, and Heroes

Unexpected successes -- positive deviations from our preconceived expectations, assumptions, and certainties about the performance of organizations, groups, individuals, even justice systems and countries – are “bright spots,” ripe opportunities for management excellence. The lesson of paying close attention to these bright spots is deceptively  simple: Don’t try to solve problems, copy successes.

Unexpected successes are the best opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship counselled Peter F. Drucker many years ago in his 1990 book, Management Challenges for the 21^st Century (HarperCollins, 82-83). We should starve problems and feed the opportunities of unexpected success, he wrote. Unexpected successes should be exploited, not ignored, or actively rejected. They are bright spots for improvements, less risky and arduous to pursue than unexpected failures. We should identify and learn from these unexpected successes as valuable data points. Unfortunately, we tend to overlook or actively reject them.

Why Is a Focus on Unexpected Bright Spots of Success So Difficult?

We do not absorb unexpected success, we do not learn from it, and we do not see it as fertile ground for innovation and entreneurwhip. Why is it so hard for managers and leaders to focus on unexpected successes, to absorb and learn from them? Three related reasons come to mind.

Sticking to the Status Quo. One reason, contends Peter Drucker, is that while unexpected success is a deviation from preconceived expectations and assumptions, we tend to regard unexpected success as an extension of the status quo, as something “normal” that surely must go on forever. While we may acknowledge our good fortune, we do not absorb unexpected success, we do not learn from it, and we do not see it as fertile ground for innovation. We should, instead, exploit it.

Negativity Bias. A second reason is our negativity bias, our problem-seeking mindset, the natural tendency to give more weight to negative experiences than to positive ones. Bad is stronger than good. In their 2010 book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard (New York: Random House), authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath, from whom I first learned about the concept of bright spots, mentioned the anecdote that many novelists succeed by focusing on marital problems, but few achieve fame by writing about a happy marriage. Pessimism sells.

Trouble spots and unexpected failures stand out more for us. Our common approach to performance measurement and management is to look first at the average – the central tendency – and then immediately focus on the laggards, especially the unexpected failures. We then speculate and launch into unproductive debate about what we believe to be the causes of the unexpected poor performance.

The all too familiar “causes” we identify – lack of capital and human resources, rampant corruption, radical policies, political unrest, inept institutions, and chronic managerial ineptitude or complacency (you get the picture) – are usually speculative and imprecisely framed in terms of broad intractable problems that typically overwhelm our capacities to find any sensible solutions.

Seeing the Glass Half-empty. A third reason it may be so hard to focus on unexpected success is our negativity bias. Facts don’t change but our perception and interpretation of their meaning changes does, typically negatively so. In another book (Innovation and Entrepreneurship, HarperCollins, 1993, 36, 99, 119, 132), written three years after his Management Challenges for the 21^st Century cited above, Peter Drucker notes: “If general perception changes from seeing the glass as ‘half empty’ to seeing it as ‘half-full,’ there are major innovative opportunities,” he writes. “Unexpected success or unexpected failure is often an indication of change in perception,” not necessarily a change in facts.

Don’t Try to Solve Problems, Copy Successes: An Example of Employee Engagement

Breakouts or disaggregation of court performance data by court unit or division, or by court location, have the potential of not only yielding insights and practical guidance for establishing baseline performance levels, setting goals and objectives, identifying trends and patterns, but also of discovering the bright spots that exceed norms (e.g., a unit or division of the court that stands out as exemplary), analysing problems, seeing patterns and trends, discovering solutions, planning, and formulating strategy.

One of the important lessons drawn from the Global Measures of Court Performance (GMCP) of the International Framework of Court Excellence is that performance is not about the numbers themselves. Performance measurement and management relies on numbers, but it is not about the numbers. It is about the perception, the understanding and the insight required of effective leadership and management. Most data points do not speak for themselves, they must be made to speak in ways that are meaningful, and ideally compelling, to us. We must imbue them with meaning by perceiving and interpreting them in a positive way. Ultimately, it is not the specific measure itself that is important, but rather the questions that it compels judicial leaders and court managers to confront.

How are we doing?

This is the fundamental set of question that leads to subsequent follow-up questions and answers that provide understanding, insight, and practical guidance:

·       Baseline Performance. Where is the court or court system today? Where is it starting from? What is the current performance level compared to established upper and lower controls or boundaries (e.g., performance targets, objectives, benchmarks, and tolerance levels)?

·       Trends.  How well is the court performing – trending — over time? Is performance better, worse, or flat? 

V   Variations.The set of questions most relevant to discovery of unexpected success and bright spots of performance: How much variance in performance is there over time and across various dimensions? Does performance depend on the location or division of the court, case type, or some other variable? Are there any positive deviants or bright spots that might serve as examples or models? 

Suppose that a court or justice system has adopted one of the 11 organizational performance measures of the Global Measures, Measure 9, Court Employee Engagement (pages 78-82). The short definition of the measure is the percent of the employees of a court or justice system who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, they put discretionary effort into their work beyond their assignment; in other words, court staff that is engaged.

 

Court Employee Engagement is actionable and its effective use is easily revealed both at the (a) most aggregated level of data (averaged across all court locations, divisions, and units of a court or court system, and across all 20 items of the survey questionnaire) likely to be the focus of the top management of a court or court system, as well as at (b) the most disaggregated level (broken down to the percent of agreement for one item among the 20 items of the questionnaire in a particular unit of a court), likely the focus of line managers and supervisors at the unit level of a court.

 

We know, of course, that there will be variation across all court employees, across courts and tribunals and units within them, across several courts in one jurisdiction, and across the 20 items in the employee engagement survey, and so forth. As noted above, our usual method for using the results of the measurement data is to focus on the average – the central tendency – and identify the laggards, the poor performing courts, regions, and countries and hold them accountable. This approach does not yield quick actionable intelligence, which is the aim of successful performance measurement and management. practitioners.

 

A Better Way

1. Identify the hidden champions, the unheralded heroes, and the bright spots among the positive deviants that score above average; 
2. figure out what they do differently than the laggards; and,
3. copy the success.

Here's how the approach of identifying bright spots and copying success is prescribed for Measure 9, Court Employee Engagement, in the Global Measures.

 

When the measure is assessed at the level of a court department, division, unit, or different locations of a court or court system (e.g., main and satellite courthouses or separate juvenile courts) managers can learn a lot about organizational performance. Simply by identifying other divisions or situations with superior results, (i.e., the bright spots), astute managers may be close to identifying possible solutions for trouble spots. Different courts (of the same level) or different divisions and different locations of a single court jurisdiction, one a bright spot and the other a trouble spot, might be compared, for example, on the percent of employees who agreed that they understand what is expected of them (Item 1 of the survey) and are proud to be working in the court (Item 20). Follow-up queries can then be made to probe the comparisons. Why are some locations more successful than others? What makes them the bright spots? What are they doing what the other lagging locations are not? Asking staff in both the most successful and least successful locations these simple questions can help to identify evidenced based good practices.

Afterword: Sidestepping the Covid-19 Pandemic

 

Writing this blog post amidst the coronavirus pandemic and other calamities facing our society today—not only the global pandemic but deepening inequality, domestic terrorism, institutional dysfunction, and political turmoil – put me in an optimistic mood.

 

As I clicked the “publish” button on this blog post, I experienced an unaccustomed and welcome thrill. Focusing on bright spots, hidden champions, and heroes, I realized I was practicing what I was preaching in this post. I was seeing the glass half-full instead of half-empty.

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