I was in a workshop and someone said a single line that made me stop and scramble for paper. Michael Bownes. A resiliency coach who has worked with a lot of teams, including a few ring winners at Alabama. He was talking about how you build the kind of relationships that hold up on the bad days.
Then he said it. “We never lose. We either win, or we learn.”
I wrote it down fast. Then I sat with it on the drive home and the second thought showed up, the one that usually does. I have seen that line before. It is on a mug somewhere. I wrote it down anyway, which tells you something about how good it feels to hear.
The mug leaves off the important part.
A loss does not teach you anything on its own. It just sits there. Raw material. Someone has to convert it, and that conversion has a price. The debrief nobody schedules. The honest question about who dropped what. The willingness to say the plan was wrong and not just unlucky. That is the work. It is boring, it is expensive, and most of us skip it.
So the team loses. Everyone gathers. Somebody says a version of “well, we learned a lot from this.” Heads nod. It feels like a lesson. Then Monday arrives and nothing is different. The words did the emotional work of learning without any of the actual work. Everyone feels resolved. Nothing changed.
The rollout I was sure of
Years back I was Executive Director of Innovation for a district. Big role. A real step up, and I was eager to show I could do things with it. My team got handed a job I was sure of. Move parents off their idea of what school was for and toward the thing we all knew was coming. Collaboration. Design thinking. Executive functioning.
Our parents had done everything right. Lawyers. Doctors. People for whom school had been a clean staircase to a good life. We were asking them to trade the staircase for something they could not picture yet.
We built the whole rollout. Parent sessions. Workshops. A sequence, a timeline, the works. Good on paper.
It did not take. And slowly the admin drifted back to what they had always done. Past practice, quietly restored, like the initiative had never happened.
Not enough buy-in, I said.
That diagnosis cost me nothing. It put the failure on the parents. It let me keep the plan, keep the theory, and keep the version of myself who had run a smart rollout that other people were not ready for.
The lesson I did not pay for was harder. I had aimed a persuasion campaign at a belief that had personally made every one of those parents successful. No workshop out-argues a life that worked. And I was so eager to prove I belonged in the role that I mistook my own certainty for a plan. I felt the loss. I named it something that let me off the hook. Then I moved on and changed nothing, and the admin sliding back to old habits was the proof.
There is a quieter version of the same move. Sometimes we reach for “we learned” so we do not have to sit in the loss at all. You lost. You are allowed to say that first. The learning does not start until you stop reaching for the reframe.
The bill comes either way
A loss does not make you wiser. It hands you an invoice. The lesson is whatever you are willing to pay for it afterward, in time and in honesty, and the first explanation you reach for is usually the one that keeps you comfortable. Next time your team says it learned a lot, ask who the explanation protects. Then ask what is different on Monday.
A question for you
Think of the last real loss your team took. What actually changed after it, and what just got called a lesson?
Reply and tell me. I read every one.
Thursday, the paid companion turns this into a debrief you can actually run.
Great post. It is true. It is easier to acknowledge the loss as lessons learned than to sit in what lessons were learned and how it will impact what we do next.
Great read. I personally am reflecting on how to take the losses from running a recent event and move those into changes and shared responsibility. And honesty. And transparency .