Analyze your successes: finding the mistakes of the future

A retelling of the paper; Mike’s exact words are quoted.

First: be aware of the problem #

So if this is a problem, what is the answer? Mike doesn’t suggest he has one, but offers two strategies he has used and found helpful.

The first is simply to be aware of the problem: to be continually aware of our inherent tendency to succumb to Murphy’s Corollary, and to the pressure to go forward under less than adequately favorable circumstances.

Second: analyze successes, not only failures #

The second is to expand the source material for our analysis of lessons learned.

We tend to share lessons learned from some kind of flight test failure. We analyze these failures and share the lessons in the hope and belief that doing so will help us avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. And that is completely appropriate and worthwhile.

At the outset, the paper asked whether this process might be missing something. This is the answer: there may also be ways to identify and avoid the mistakes of the future, mistakes we don’t know anything about because we’ve not yet seen them.

That might be done through a careful and critical pre- and post-test analysis of our successes, aimed at finding the successes that were wholly or partly the result of good fortune rather than sound decision making.

A metric and a target, set beforehand #

1. Before the test, establish a quantitative metric that relates to safety.
2. Set a target for performance, with a significant margin of safety.
3. Measure actual performance against the target. An outcome that didn’t meet it is an apparent success that perhaps should not be considered a success.

The target is set before the outcome is known, so the relief of a successful outcome can’t move it.

The O-ring seals: how it could have worked #

This could have been done in the Shuttle program. The 2015 and 2018 talks make it concrete: a quantifiable target for how well the solid rocket booster O-ring seals held back hot gas, with a significant margin of safety. Failing to meet that target would have triggered a stop to the program until the problem was fixed.

We can guess why that wasn’t done. The program was underperforming, and the pressure to go, which can exist at many levels within a complex organization, was likely significant. In Mike’s words, Ironically, however, it’s not unlikely that the program lost more time in fixing the problem after the catastrophe than would have been lost to a proactive approach to fixing it ahead of time.

A worked example #

From Mike’s prepared answers for the 2015 Anaheim talk, not the paper.

Asked for an example of a quantitative metric he has used, Mike answered:

The two most demanding and dangerous phases of hang glider flight are take off and landing, because of the foot-launched nature of the enterprise, and the consequent small margin between the speed attainable by running, and the minimum speed necessary to fly, and also because of the inherently limited control authority near stall of a lightly loaded weight shift controlled aircraft. I assign a numerical grade to each launch and landing I make, and measure it against a target. When I come up short of the target, I try to figure out where my mistake was, and correct for future take offs or landings.

Mike’s scales, written for this site.

His scales:

The target for both is 3. In Mike’s words, anything lower than 3 prompts a re-consideration of all factors and decision making involved in the landing, or in the launch.

It’s never over #

A summary of the paper’s closing.

A rigorous analysis of successful outcomes expands our source material for lessons learned. If it uncovers decisions or procedures that were flawed in some way, it extends how much our lessons learned can improve safety.

The paper’s own closing words: The paper’s conclusion.

From the 2018 Gulfstream talk, not the paper.

These are challenges over which we never achieve a final victory. The best we can hope for is a continuing successful battle.

A wise man once said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” A man of considerably lesser wisdom offers this rejoinder: “It’s never over.”

@misc{meier2026analyzingsuccess,
  author = {Meier, Mike},
  title  = {Analyze Your Successes: Finding the Mistakes of the Future},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Edition 1.0},
  url    = {https://meiersafe.com/analyzing-success/}
}