Lessons Learned are worth the effort!

The Canadian charity Engineers without Boarders is learning the way in looking at their projects openly, admitting what went wrong and sharing the lessons they learn through that process. That is a level of maturity many organizations don’t have – even if they have a process that says they do retrospectives or lessons learned. They say they have made more impact and reached more lasting goals because of this.  And they encourage others to do the same on http://www.admittingfailure.com

Another charity that has taken up this call is Peace Dividend Trust who are looking at their management, operational processes and projects. The high level report can be found on the same website at  http://www.admittingfailure.com/failure/scott-gilmore/  How many organizations look at their portfolio as a whole and draw out these conclusions?

With ever moving goal posts, disruptive change, demands to keep costs down and pressure to squeeze productivity to its highest level, taking time to do this seems counter intuitive. However, time and time again I see evidence to support having thinking and planning time high up the priority list. I’m not talking about analysis paralysis but just stopping twice to reflect before the next action. Firstly, before that “just get on with it” movement to find the answer to two questions: is this the right thing to do and do we have all we need to do it? Secondly, after the action to ask: did that get a good sustainable result and how could we work more efficiently (or effectively) next time?

If you feel all this thinking is overhead, consider this: when you are hungry or tired, how slow you are compared to how much better you perform when rested and properly fed.