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