Sense and decide
The Success Audit
Check what past wins taught the team to stop questioning
The team lists its past wins, names the beliefs each win made it confident about, and checks whether those beliefs still hold.
Borrowed from research on the "paradox of success" by Pino Audia, Edwin Locke, and Ken Smith, and from James March's work on "competency traps." Read the original source.
One session · An hour or more to set up · Needs senior backing
Try this first
Ask, "What is true about our work today that was not true when this approach started working?"
Use it when
The team's ideas keep coming back to the approach that worked before, even though the market, the customer, or the tools have changed.
Skip it when
Nothing important has changed around the team and its results are still good. Also skip it right after a painful failure, when the team needs to review the failure, not its wins.
How to introduce it
Pick two or three things the team is proud of. For each one, write down why it worked and what the team came to believe because it worked. Then ask of each belief whether the conditions that made it true still exist. Mark each belief as still true, no longer true, or unknown. The unknowns are what the team tests next.
How to show up
Go first, with a belief you hold because of a past win. Protect the people who question the team's best-known successes, because those successes often belong to senior people in the room. Keep the purpose practical. The point is to find out what has changed, not to take credit away from anyone.
How long it takes
About an hour for the session. Testing the unknowns takes longer.
What makes it hard
Success makes people more confident and less willing to listen to critics, so the beliefs that most need checking are the ones people defend hardest. The strategies being questioned often belong to the leaders in the room. AI adds to the pull. A model built on what has worked before tends to suggest more of the same.
What it looks like when it's working
At least one belief moves from "still true" to "unknown," and the team agrees how to test it. If every belief comes out still true, the team is defending its record instead of examining it.
How long until it sticks
This is a periodic review, not a daily habit. Run it once or twice a year, and whenever something big changes around the team.
How you know it stuck
When a big change arrives, the team asks which of its old assumptions the change affects before deciding what to do.
The idea behind it
Getting good at one way of working makes a team use it more, which leaves it with less experience of anything else. When conditions change, the team keeps doing what worked, often harder than before.
Where it comes from
Research basis. James March and colleagues described the competency trap: the better an organization gets at one way of working, the less likely it is to try a better one. Audia, Locke, and Smith tested the idea with ten years of data from US airline and trucking companies, and paired it with a laboratory experiment. Companies with more past success held onto their strategies more after a big change in their industry, and then performed worse. Past success raised people's satisfaction, confidence, and goals, and made them less willing to seek out criticism. That research supports the problem this move addresses. The review format itself has not been tested.