Most teams treat the retrospective as a problem-solving session. You spend a few minutes listing what went well, then pivot quickly to what went wrong — that’s where the “real” improvements come from. Right?

 

Not so fast, says Rob Hatch.

 

In this latest episode of Agile Driven Impact, co-hosts Diane and Erich sit down with Rob, an executive coach and author of Attention!, Success Frames, and Stay Focused, to challenge one of the most deeply held assumptions in continuous improvement: that failure is the best teacher.

 

Rob’s argument is simple and backed by research: analyzing failure gives you a list of what to avoid. Analyzing success gives you a framework you can actually build on. As he put it in the episode, “the lessons that come from figuring out why something worked and how you did what you did are far more important than just ‘don’t do that thing again.'”

 

He calls this a Success Frame — a reflective practice of deconstructing a win to understand the conditions, operations, and actions that drove it. What were the circumstances? What did the team actually do? How did they approach it? Once you can name those, you can make success repeatable.

 

There’s also a practical reason to shift the balance. Failure analysis carries an ego threat that makes it hard to linger on honestly. Teams move past it quickly — which means they don’t fully learn from it anyway.

 

The takeaway for your next retrospective: don’t just list what went well. Ask why it went well. That one question is more powerful than it sounds.

 

If you want to go deeper on making retrospectives actually useful, start with reading our blog How to Run More Engaging Sprint Retrospectives at Your Nonprofit or revisit The MOST Important Event Your Team Participates In.

 

And whether you listen to the full podcast episode or not (I obviously hope you do!), we’d love to hear what is your natural inclination… Do you lean more toward leaning from “failure” or learning from success?