Success is a strange substance. Initially energising, it can also become intoxicating or blindingly arrogant. And if left to harden—without question or renewal—it often turns from fuel into fossil. I’ve seen it time and again: a business wins big, rightly celebrates, frames the moment... and then unknowingly starts orbiting it forever. No improvement or innovation in sight.

The most dangerous phrase in leadership?  -  “This is how we became successful.”

The second most dangerous?   -  “Let’s keep doing what has worked before.”

As someone who’s worked across dozens of companies, I’ve come to believe: the biggest threat to future relevance is unexamined past glory. Learning from failures AND success.

Organisations are full of trophies—metaphorical and literal. The best-selling product line. The contract that “put us on the map.” The marketing success that got awards in 2018. These stories become sacred. They’re used to justify budget allocations, hiring decisions, and continuation of unexamined business processes that had become redundant.

But here’s the problem: the world moves on. Markets and logistic supply lines shift. Tools change. Customer expectations seriously mutate. And what once signalled brilliance, now silently constrains it.

From a systems perspective, every output—yes, even a success—is a product of specific conditions. Time, context, constraints, competition, core competence. When those inputs change, you cannot expect the same outputs to perform the same magic.

In complex environments, yesterday’s solution can easily become today’s bottleneck, or in the worst case a dead-end.

Often the method and the development process had become sacrosanct although glaringly ineffective. Better to retire the old playbook and then write a better one. Celebrate the change.

Smart Questions to think about:

Prompt 1: What internal “trophies” are still being displayed in your organisation, even though their relevance may have expired?

Prompt 2: How can you honour your legacy while designing your systems to prioritise future conditions over past confidence?