Success Over Time

Success isn't judged in a moment of brilliance, but over time.We live in a world that is dynamic,  not static.  What matters is producing results over time in different situations.  Judging based off of a single success limits our ability to adapt to produce future successes.

This Isn’t Success

It was 1994, and we had just finished a refueling outage at a nuclear plant ahead of our planned schedule. We incurred no injuries and exceeded our profitability target. I was feeling pretty good going into the project review with the customer. Their plant was running well.

Having met or exceeded every aspect they requested, I felt relaxed and was in a confident mood at the start of the meeting. About three minutes into walking them through the details, our customer’s plant manager stopped me and said, “You guys performed well, and...one data point does not a trend make. I want to talk about how you are going to maintain this type of performance, when you have real challenges.”

My Self-Talk was, “What? No acknowledgment of our success? He is ungrateful! I am out of here!” As I reflected, showing my RBF (Resting Bastard Face), I asked myself, “What if this had been my father’s plant?” (My father was an executive in the power business and had many plants he was responsible for.)

Success Over Time

In that moment, I recognized our customer cared about our performance over time. I was part of a bigger team whose actions happened over time. I reflected again on my customer’s claim,

“One data point does not make a trend.” I came to realize that to judge success or failure from one data point can lead me and my team to make weak or flawed choices.

Success that is cultivated over a period of time is success that requires trial and error. Failure teaches you how to solve problems, deal with loss and learn how to turn your mistakes into lifelong lessons. - Joe Courtney

I created a line to toss: ‘One data point does not make a trend’. To act or react based on one data point is not powerful.

Just as one success is not indicative of future success, one breakdown does not doom us to failure.

I am skilled at tossing the ‘one data point does not a trend make’, both when we have a first-time occurrence of a breakdown and when we have had multiple occurrences. And to ground ourselves we look at the data to see how many occurrences of the same breakdown have happened.

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