How to Find Lessons to Learn

Lessons learned sessions are now part of the standard way of doing things, even though we know them by any number of names: Lessons Learned, After Action Review, Navy Lessons Learned, Post Mortem, Post Partum, Retrospective, Team Reflection, Project Review, and more. By whatever name, the goal is to determine what would have improved performance in the effort underway or just completed, and what might help in future efforts.

A systematic method for uncovering potential nuggets is valuable, because it reduces the chance of overlooking something important. General Morphological Analysis (GMA), invented by Fritz Zwicky, can help. [Ritchey 1998] That's a fancy name for slicing the problem space into cells and examining those cells one by one.

Slicing the problem space along two dimensions is the easiest to imagine. For Lessons Learned, I like to use the dimensions Innovation by Audience.

Innovation

Along the Innovation axis, use five categories. "Keep" includes what worked well, and what we want to keep doing. "Start" includes things we want to start doing. "Stop" includes the things that didn't work, and which we want to stop doing. "Alter" includes adjustments that we believe would be helpful for future efforts. "Try" includes ideas for experiments for the future.

Audience

The Audience axis is a list of roles, commonly called stakeholders. As we investigate each role, we imagine a conversation with people in those roles. We don't necessarily conduct actual conversations — many of these people are unavailable, and a few of them might not want to talk to us. The imaginary conversations are just tools we use to generate ideas. Audience roles can include the Project Management Office, the Team, Functional Managers, Senior Managers, Customers, Purchasing, Marketing, and so on. For this discussion, let's go with these seven roles.

In this way, we create a 5x7 matrix with one cell for each Innovation by Role combination. For each cell, we consider what we might ask or tell someone in that role about some particular Innovation.

For example, A systematic method for uncovering
potential nuggets is valuable,
because it reduces the chance of
overlooking something importantwe might consider telling a Functional Manager to stop substituting one team member for another, and then explain why. We wouldn't necessarily say this to a Functional Manager, but imagining saying it gives us a way to uncover an issue that we might then examine to determine what we can do to improve performance. This example leads to a suggestion that we plan more thoroughly for handling the risk of team member substitution.

By repeating this investigation for all 5x7=35 cells of the problem space, we might discover lessons to be learned that we might otherwise overlook.

Overlooking a lesson is one thing; being reluctant to talk about it is another. People can be reluctant to say aloud what they can easily imagine saying to senior management. To provide some safety, consider collecting suggestions for all cells anonymously.

GMA and safety, together, can provide a useful framework for your next Lessons Learned session.  Top    Next Issue

Are your projects always (or almost always) late and over budget? Are your project teams plagued by turnover, burnout, and high defect rates? Turn your culture around. Read 52 Tips for Leaders of Project-Oriented Organizations, filled with tips and techniques for organizational leaders. Order Now!

Footnotes

Your comments are welcome

About Point Lookout

Thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful, and that you'll consider recommending it to a friend.

This article in its entirety was written by a human being. No machine intelligence was involved in any way.

Point Lookout is a free weekly email newsletter. Browse the archive of past issues. Subscribe for free.

Support Point Lookout by joining the Friends of Point Lookout, as an individual or as an organization.

Do you face a complex interpersonal situation? Send it in, anonymously if you like, and I'll give you my two cents.

Related articles

More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:

Games for Meetings: II

We spend a lot of time and emotional energy in meetings, much of it engaged in any of dozens of ritualized games. Here's Part II of a little catalog of some of our favorites, and what we could do about them.

False Summits: I

Mountaineers often experience "false summits," when just as they thought they were nearing the summit, it turns out that there is much more climbing to do. So it is in project work.

The Utility Pole Antipattern: II

Complex organizational processes can delay action. They can set people against one other and prevent organizations from achieving their objectives. In this Part II of our examination of these complexities, we look into what keeps processes complicated, and how to deal with them.

Performance Mismanagement Systems: I

Some well-intentioned performance management programs do more harm than good, possibly because of mistaken fundamental beliefs. Specifically: the fallacy of composition, the reification error, the myth of identifiable contributions, and the myth of omniscient supervision.

Recapping Factioned Meetings

A factioned meeting is one in which participants identify more closely with their factions, rather than with the meeting as a whole. Agreements reached in such meetings are at risk of instability as participants maneuver for advantage after the meeting.

See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.

Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout

Coming May 14: Working with the Overconfident

A cognitive bias known as the Overconfidence Effect causes us to overestimate the reliability of our judgments. Decisions we make based on those judgments are therefore suspect. But there are steps we can take to make our confidence levels more realistic, and thus make our decisions more reliable. Available here and by RSS on May 14.

And on May 21: Mismanaging Project Managers

Most organizations hold project managers accountable for project performance. But they don't grant those project managers control of needed resources. Nor do they hold project sponsors or other senior managers accountable for the consequences of their actions when they interfere with project work. Here's a catalog of behaviors worth looking at. Available here and by RSS on May 21.

Coaching services

I offer email and telephone coaching at both corporate and individual rates. Contact Rick for details at rbrenDJpmhgyaDTwBQXkhner@ChacmGoYuzfZpOvDQdRkoCanyon.com or (650) 787-6475, or toll-free in the continental US at (866) 378-5470.

Get the ebook!

Past issues of Point Lookout are available in six ebooks:

• Get 2001-2 in Geese Don't Land on Twigs (PDF, )
• Get 2003-4 in Why Dogs Wag (PDF, )
• Get 2005-6 in Loopy Things We Do (PDF, )
• Get 2007-8 in Things We Believe That Maybe Aren't So True (PDF, )
• Get 2009-10 in The Questions Not Asked (PDF, )
• Get all of the first twelve years (2001-2012) in The Collected Issues of Point Lookout (PDF, )

Are you a writer, editor or publisher on deadline? Are you looking for an article that will get people talking and get compliments flying your way? You can have 500-1000 words in your inbox in one hour. License any article from this Web site. More info