I Was Wrong is the title of the famous book by Jim Bakker, which was accompanied by a round of appearances on national television talk shows, after the once influential evangelical preacher was released from prison following his fall from grace.

We’re not afraid to take risks, we are not afraid to make mistakes, and we are ultimately not afraid to fail. As Napoleon Bonaparte said: “He who fears defeat is sure to be conquered”. We work to actively create a culture where people have the freedom to innovate, to explore, to find their way forward, and yes - from time to time to mistep. Part of that is “minimizing the downside” - creating a culture where we can admit, identify, and rectify mistakes as soon as possible, without having to feel a need to cover them up.

I’m particularly interested in studying success and failure. As Marcus Buckingham puts it:

You don’t learn how to be good by studying bad and negating it. The opposite of bad is not good - it’s “not bad”.

You don’t learn what to do by studying failure. However, you can identify essential elements of success by contrasting and comparing success and failure and analyzing the differences. I’m always interested to know how things are going in different places. “What is working, what is not working? Why?” I’m always looking to understand things better, to be more conscious and intentional in my service.

However, my endeavours to inquire and understand are hampered by the following complications:

• Different places have different environmental conditions. It’s not comparing exactly equivalent things with each other.
• The perceptions that we use to study the different situations come from different people. They have their own unique ways of perceiving things, so again it’s not comparing exactly equivalent things.

Recently, however, a golden opportunity fell my way. I was able to do an examination of two operations in the same environment, using the same perceptual baseline. That is The Loft and Atma Yoga in Brisbane.

I was able to see the unexpected success of The Loft, and the equally unexpected failure of Atma Yoga, and then with a team of fellow surgeons perform a postmortem in situ.

What we discovered in this process has been priceless.

Of course Atma Yoga has not failed, but these past two months have allowed us to come to deeper grips with the elements of the Loft that make it successful. Over the next few days I’m going to share that postmortem with you, and explain what we have discovered to be the active ingredients of the situation.

For those who come to Atma Yoga, you may have noticed a change since we made the move. I think that you’ll notice further pleasant changes back over this next period. No, we won’t be breaking a hole in the guttering to get the sound of the storm water pouring outside the window during relaxation , but we will be bringing back the essential mood of the Loft, and I think in an even deeper way, now that we have come to grips with what it is. After you’ve been soaking in it for a while it becomes invisible to you. These past two months have been an opportunity for us, now that we’ve caught our breath from the hard yakka of moving the place over, to reflect a bit on what makes the Loft / Atma Yoga so special. We’ve spent a lot of time talking with people and finding out from them what it is that they enjoy about the place.

There’s so much more to Atma Yoga than just Yoga, but you already knew that…