Suresh Muthulingam

What you need to learn from, if you want to learn from failure, you need to have some stability in your team so that the teams can analyze what went wrong.

People can overcome their biases and hopefully learn or kick away some nuggets of useful wisdom which they can apply on other projects.

You get feedback and maybe reflect on what went wrong.

And it requires some amount of change.

The only learning happens, okay, you may know what went wrong, but after you know, you need to act or change behavior.

And if you don't do that, knowing is not enough.

It has to translate into action.

And in the absence of such a connection, learning from failure is very, very challenging.

So there could be exceptions, but on average, what we find from our data and from the analysis of around 2,100 movies over a couple of decades is, yes, on average, if you have team members who have primarily experienced failure, and if they come together, then more likely the current project will also not do well.

Yeah, so when the teams are like the same, right, like especially if you're talking about Seinfeld or most TV sitcoms, the people who are working, the creative team, the actors, the producers, everyone is the same from season to season.

So after the first season goes and maybe the ratings are not as good as they expected,

They can reflect and they can possibly change things or tweak things around and iron out some of the problems.

And maybe that will lead to better ratings.

So that industry has an advantage in the sense that the teams are a little bit more stable than in movies.

Movies, maybe sometimes you have a set of people who repeat, but the entire team very rarely repeats.

So if you're on a short-term project, that should be ideally after the end of the project, there should be some means of sort of analyzing the project, trying to see what went right and what didn't go wrong.

So in the absence of such a mechanism, learning becomes very, very challenging.

And that's the problem you face in many short-term project situations, whether you're...

working on a construction industry, whether you're working on a consulting project, whether you're drilling an oil well.

So after you disband the team, if that review process is not there, learning is not going to happen.