Most of our lives, whether professional or personal, is spent striving to succeed.  It’s tempting to think that success in one aspect of our life will beget success in other areas too.  After all, those habits and behaviors that helped in the first instance are bound to be useful again.

Of course, things are seldom that straight forward.  On an individual level, the halo effect illustrates how abilities and success seldom transfer across domains, whilst the infamous innovators dilemma shows how difficult it is to make waves in a new field once you’ve already succeeded in one.

A recent study from the University of London emphasizes how success can often be more of a trap than a springboard.

The paper reveals how successful companies are much more reluctant to venture into new areas and suffer from inertia when faced with changing market conditions.

Success based inertia

The study saw senior leaders at over 100 high tech companies grilled about their attitude to change and success.  You would imagine such leaders would be agile and nimble given the rapid pace of change in technology, but you’d be wrong to think that.

They identified three distinct forms of inertia within companies:

1. favoring the familiar over the unknown
2. preferring what is established over what is new
3. failing to search for new solutions

The survey of executives hoped to lift the lid on how their organizations tackled these various issues.  Were they adept at acquiring new knowledge or balancing internal and external skill sets?

Not sensing or responding

The paper reveals that sticking rigidly to routines, even ones that have been successful in the past, is anathema to innovation.  Companies that were stuck in their successful ways had real difficulties sensing new and divergent knowledge, reacting to changes in their environment and providing innovative responses to this changing market.

Now, it should be said that the financial implications of this intransigence were not writ large in the study, at least in the short-term.  The authors did however link the adaptability to the general performance of the organization.

Interestingly, despite market conditions in rapidly changing sectors seeming to promote sense and respond style behaviors, the study found that organizations in these sectors were worst of all.

The impact of such rigidity seemed to grow as the companies grew in size, which merely goes to highlight how difficult it is to change organizations of any size.

Is success worse than failure?

The authors contend that in many instances, success can have graver long-term implications than failure, at least in terms of wedding us to certain behaviors.

Whilst failure traps, such as sticking with practices that don’t work, is harmful, the paper argues that the traps identified above are more damaging because they infect the entire operation of the company, whereas failure is often more isolated.

It underlines the importance of not resting on ones laurels and continuously exploring your horizons for new and better ways of doing things.

“When firms have successfully adapted to the environment, they tend to perceive this as a rationale for current organizational logic, norms and practices, and hence become less open to learning from new knowledge and less prepared to adapt when the environment changes,” the authors declare.

If you’d like some help equipping your employees (and your organization) for such adaptability, we can start that conversation today.