2 min read

Jan 23, 2025

“That which does not kill us, makes us stronger” – Nietzsche (1895) Twilight of the Idols. What did he mean exactly and what specifically do we learn from setbacks that equip us to be better and stronger in the future?

Nietzsche believed that suffering and hardship, when endured and overcome, can lead to personal growth and strength.

Challenges push individuals to confront their limitations, adapt, and emerge more capable than before. By surviving adversity, a person becomes more resilient and better prepared to face future struggles. The same is true of teams.

And it makes sense: if we as a population or 'collective team' were faced with a new pandemic tomorrow, we would be better prepared to deal with the inevitable challenges.

In many ways, resilience supports high performance because future challenges become less daunting if previous setbacks have been overcome and learned from.

But learning from failure is not a process that attracts much investment in corporate environments. The behavioural science author, Rory Sutherland, highlights that decision-making in our personal lives is often centred around minimising regret, whereas decision-making in corporate life is focussed on minimising blame.

This seems silly. If high performance in the future is sustained through learning from our mistakes in the past, then useful inquiry into our working processes can only be a good thing. In fact, just such a process, ‘double-loop’ learning is crucial in the development of high performing teams.

Agryris (1991), who coined the phrase ‘double loop learning’ to reflect a deeper more fundamental learning in organisations, recognised that most leaders and teams are very good at problem-solving (the single loop). However, they do not go deep enough to see the patterns of beliefs, behaviours or assumptions that gave rise to the problem in the first place (the second loop).

Subsequently, teams often fail to consider what conditions are necessary to course-correct their beliefs and behaviours to avoid repeating the problem in the future.

Spending time considering the journey from the moment the problem was highlighted to the moment the problem disappeared would reveal useful insight such as:

Who in the team had the knowledge to identify the solution?

Were they empowered to put that solution in place or did it have to be delegated?

And therefore, does specialist knowledge need to be shared more widely, or employees authorised to act with more autonomy in certain situations?

This is the second loop. The first loop solves the problem, the second reinforces how a team came together to solve it so similar issues in the future can be tackled with ease. It also examines the unspoken rules and team culture that may have stopped the team from operating at its best.

Even high-performing teams make mistakes.

But the key difference is they will rarely make them twice.

References:

Argyris, C. (1991). Teaching Smart People How to Learn. Harvard Business Review, 69(3), 99-109.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1895). Twilight of the Idols. Edited by Duncan Large, Oxford University Press, 2008