
Conferees attending the NATO Lessons Learned Conference 2015. NATO's Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre performs joint analysis of operations, training, exercises and experiments. It supports the exchange of Lessons Learned and facilitates the development of lessons learned capabilities. Does your company have a means of propagating lessons learned through the enterprise? Photo courtesy Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre.
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
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Related articles
More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
Games for Meetings: IV
- 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 IV of a little catalog of some of our favorites, and what we could do about them.
Organizational Loss: Searching Behavior
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the organization and its people. Here are some typical patterns of destructive responses to organizational
loss.
Why We Don't Care Anymore
- As a consultant and coach I hear about what people hate about their jobs. Here's some of it. It might
help you appreciate your job.
Paid-Time-Off Risks
- Associated with the trend to a single pool of paid time off from separate categories for vacation, sick
time, and personal days are what might be called paid-time-off risks. If your team must meet customer
expectations or a schedule of deliverables, managing paid-time-off risks can be important.
Personal Feasibility Decisions
- When considering whether to exploit a rare but desirable opportunity, there is a risk that desire can
overcome good sense. Having at hand a predefined framework for making such decisions reduces the risk
of blundering by acting in haste.
See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness and Organizational Change for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming December 13: Contrary Indicators of Psychological Safety: I
- To take the risks that learning and practicing new ways require, we all need a sense that trial-and-error approaches are safe. Organizations seeking to improve processes would do well to begin by assessing their level of psychological safety. Available here and by RSS on December 13.
And on December 20: Contrary Indicators of Psychological Safety: II
- When we begin using new tools or processes, we make mistakes. Practice is the cure, but practice can be scary if the grace period for early mistakes is too short. For teams adopting new methods, psychological safety is a fundamental component of success. Available here and by RSS on December 20.
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