Memorial Day Sacrifice

To start I would like to remember and honor the military personnel who have paid the ultimate sacrifice for their country this Memorial Day weekend.

This Memorial Day weekend has certainly not started out as safe as we would have hope for. As I awoke this morning, again I read the fatal reports from two different districts, at times this can seem like our efforts are without recompense. I will assure you that is not the case, we must keep up the good fight against drunk and drugged drivers, while assuring that Tennesseans are utilizing their restraint devices, that is their best defense in the event of a serious crash. As the Colonel stated, as leaders, we must get our hands around the distracted driver issue, so we must find a way to

increase our efforts in that area.

While we have had recent success from the strategies that we have implemented; I have over the last six month attempted to draw a conclusion as to what has occurred to alter that path of success. While reading through a recent article in the Harvard Business Review for a college course, I came across an article entitled Why Leaders Don’t Learn from Success. There was a section in part that stated in part, success can make us believe that we are better decision makers than we actually are. In a simple recent study of managers in various industries, we asked members of one group to recall a time when they experienced a success in their professional lives and members of a second group to recall a time when they experienced a failure. We then asked people in both groups to engage in a series of decision-making tasks and embedded measures in the exercise that allowed us to assess their confidence, optimism, and risk-seeking behavior. Compared with the executives who’d recalled a failure, those who’d recalled a success were much more confident in their abilities, made more-optimistic forecasts of their future success, and were more likely to take bigger bets. These findings are consistent with research examining how success breeds overconfidence in other contexts and causes us to ignore advice.

This basically means that many times you can get very comfortable in doing the things you are doing, and can get overconfident inspired by the past successes. When that occurs, you could start to possible begin to dismiss new innovative ideas, overlook satisfaction of employees, and that begins to infect the entire organization.

I really want you to read over the next few paragraphs, that I have included, I think that they are very important reading:

Learning is the process of updating our theories. In some cases personal experience alters them. For example, Steve Jobs recounted in a 2005 graduation speech at Stanford University how the inclusion of multiple typefaces and proportional spacing on the first Macintosh stemmed from the calligraphy course he took after dropping out of college. But members of an organization also learn together. Experience with both winners (the iPod) and losers (the Newton) has caused Apple, as a company, to update its theories of what leads to successful products.

From this perspective, learning is all about understanding why things happen and why some decisions lead to specific outcomes.

This understanding does not come automatically. We make a conscious choice to challenge our assumptions and models. And usually, we do so as the result of a failure. This has been true from the time we first tried to walk or ride a bicycle. We fall down, it hurts, and we try another approach. An amazing number of high-ranking executives report that early failures in their careers taught them lessons that ultimately led to their success. Failure provides a motivation for organizations to learn,

too.

But what about success? Success does not disprove your theory. And if it isn’t broken, why fix it? Consequently, when we succeed, we just focus on applying what we already know to solving problems. We don’t revise our theories or expand our knowledge of how our business works.

Does success mean “it isn’t broken”?

Not necessarily. The reality is that while a success (or a string of successes) may mean you’re on the right track, you can’t assume this to be true without further testing, experimentation, and reflection. You should use success to breed more success by understanding it. Consider Jobs’s decision to launch the iPhone, learn from that experience, and apply that knowledge to launch the iPad. Jobs and others at Apple were undoubtedly wary of plunging ahead with the iPad first because of the failure of Apple’s Newton tablet in the 1990s. In a brilliant move, they recognized that a touchphone would be easier to launch, given the existing smartphone market, making it the ideal vehicle for Apple to learn about and perfect touch devices.

This example points to a better model for learning, one in which failure and success are on equal footing and both trigger further investigation that helps us revise our assumptions, models, and

theories.

I feel that this serves as a good example, as an agency we have been and still are extremely successful, is it now broken? No, many of our numbers remain at record lows, however the overall number that we are attempting to impact, the drive to zero fatalities are up. To breed further success, we must learn from our prior experiences and apply that knowledge, revise our theories if needed and push forwarded. The book by Marshall Goldsmith says it all, What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful.

As we begin to turn the corner towards the last half of 2016, I will choose to take the glass is half full approach, I can’t wait to see the final results at the end of the year. I feel certain that we are fixing to turn the corner; we should all plan for extra big enforcement months in August and December, an all hands on deck approach. I cannot express my gratitude to each and every one of you enough for the hard work thus far in 2016; your efforts have not gone unnoticed.

Instead of a quote, I will share this with you to pass alone to others, there are only three (3) ways we will not be successful as a group:

1) Blame all our problems on others
2) Complain about everything
3) Not be grateful

Here are the Sunday Notes from our partners from around the country.