Lessons learned is an expression we hear a lot of in project management. Typically, though, organisations and project managers wait until the end of the project to share them, by which stage it’s too late, as there’s a good chance that those mistakes will already have been repeated.

And repeating mistakes is something we’re great at in our projects. In 2011 the Victorian Ombudsman conducted a review of ICT-enabled projects in Victoria, Australia. They found the common themes for failure were:

• leadership, accountability and governance
• planning
• funding
• probity and procurement
• project management.

Every single project they reviewed made mistakes that organisations have been making for the previous 10 years. In the five years since the report was released into the public domain, every one of the mistakes they outlined in their report has been repeated by organisations not just in Australia but worldwide. Pick any project management survey or report you can find from 1995 onward and you’ll see what I mean.

It seems that sharing bad news stories doesn’t work, so how about we start to share good news stories instead? ‘What went well’ always gets less airtime than ‘what went badly’, and project leaders can change this.

In her book Broadcasting Happiness, Michelle Gielan writes about the positive effects that good news can have on us, as opposed to the bad news we’re continually exposed to. She found that three minutes of negative news in the morning makes viewers 27 per cent more likely to report having had a bad day six to eight hours later. Those who were exposed to transformative stories, on the other hand, reported having a good day 88 per cent of the time.

While Gielan’s book focuses on the media industry, the same principle is surely true of our organisations. The best lessons that project leaders can help other people learn are those around ‘what went well’.

Create a visual success wall, where people can put up cards displaying the things they’ve got right. Call out success on your corporate collaboration system or intranet. Capture your successes in a document to be shared with all project managers as they start new projects. Or just talk about the things that went well. All the time.

This is not a call for arrogance, as project leaders don’t look to take the credit for successes. In trying to change the project management game, we want to stop the rot of continually repeating mistakes of the past by continually repeating the successes instead.