New Game-Plan: Learning Lessons

Services

About Us

Our services and capabilities:

• Enabling organisations to learn lessons from their experience to improve future performance

• Workshops which stimulate and engage thinking - making sense from diverse inputs

• Delivering practical plans to develop and embed the capabilities needed for future success

Why learn lessons?

Everyone knows that an organisation’s effectiveness depends on learning lessons from experience, yet most organisations fail to do it in practice. All too often, in fact, what are logged as ‘lessons learned’ turn out to be ‘commonly-repeated mistakes’! Failure to learn lessons seriously weakens an organisation. For example:

• If a high-profile issue is mismanaged because lessons from past experience have not been applied, public confidence will be lost - witness recent floods, epidemics, high-profile construction projects, and social programmes

• On a day-to-day basis, the failure to embed learning indicates that knowledge is being held by individuals rather than by the organisation as a whole - a risk to long-term corporate survival

 There are understandable, but inexcusable, reasons for failing to learn lessons:

• Focusing on ‘the next initiative’ because this offers better prospects of recognition and reward

• Believing, from experience, that the organisation will not effectively follow through on lessons, so there is no point in identifying them

• A reluctance to discuss areas of poor performance openly - for fear of damage to professional pride or rewards

• The lack of an appropriate process to gather and analyse experience and promote informed good practice

In fact, organisations can break out of this stalemate simply by creating an appropriate process. Our 'Lessons Learned Programme overcomes the blockers to an organisation’s ability to learn from experience.

Learning lessons makes obvious sense but is rarely done well. It is essential to think broadly and constructively rather than assign blame. Key parts of the process are challenging - creating the culture for constructive discussion, accurately identifying the lesson, identifying solutions, implementing them, and making them stick.

How does our Lessons Learned Programme help?

We enable organisations to identify, share and apply lessons - so they stick. Our workshop-based Programme:

• Provides a structured process, striking the right balance between creativity and logical processing. We not only identify lessons but also articulate them, develop the business case for change, define useful actions, and get personal buy-in.
• Combines anonymous and group work – this ensures full, frank, disclosure and collaborative development of solutions.
• Involves independent and non-judgemental facilitation. Rather than passive flip-chart recording, we use insight, challenge and distillation in a positive climate to capture lessons in a non-threatening way.

Our approach to knowledge-sharing is quick, focused, effective, and welcomed by participants – unlike many ‘Knowledge Management’ initiatives. The Programme is invaluable is striving for excellence at all levels – whether for organisation, team, or individual. The Programme is delivered through our structured Brain-Pool Workshops, which we design, facilitate, analyse and report in partnership with our sponsors.

Where to apply Lessons Learned?

The programme is relevant wherever knowledge exchange needs to be enhanced. Common examples are:

• Silo-busting - so people appreciate others' perspectives in order to take decisions optimised for the Business, not the Function.
• Accelerated team development - especially critical in the wake of merger or acquisition
• Post-project reviews to extract and apply lessons following a project in order that the organisation can execute future projects more effectively or take-on more such projects
• Developing business communities - boosting the effectiveness of existing ones or kick-starting new ones.

A 'Lessons Learned' case study

This case study summarises how we designed, facilitated, analysed and reported a ‘Lessons Learned’ Brain-Pool Workshop, for a global biosciences company. The focus was on projects where unforeseen problems in formulating pesticides had led to serious costs and delays in manufacture, supply-chain distribution, and use. The case study is also available as a download.

Workshop Preparation

Prior to the Workshop, the participants were asked, from their experience, to articulate ‘Symptom-Effect Statements’, contexts for these, and areas of Project work which had gone ‘well’ or had been ‘doubtful’. We provided thinking prompts and templates in each case. We distilled these contributions into a report setting out ‘Generic Problem Statements’. This was circulated to the participants.

Developing ‘Cause Statements’

In the Workshop, the participants validated the Generic Problem Statements and used them, in a staged process, to develop ‘Cause Statements’. These included not only the obvious, ‘immediate’ causes, but also ‘root’ causes and contributory ‘indirect’ causes. Participants worked individually, then in groups, to compare ideas and develop rounded contributions. These were recorded, shared and commented upon by others using a wireless network of mini-laptops. Some 200 contributions were generated in this exercise. We distilled these to create ‘Distilled Cause Statements’, which were then reviewed and validated in a plenary session.

Identifying ‘Good Practices’

‘Good Practices’ were then developed against each of the Distilled Cause Statements. Participants again worked individually, then in groups, to compare ideas, develop rounded contributions and share these for further ‘builds’. Over 40 ‘Good Practices’ were generated. These were used to stimulate discussion of ‘blockers’ and ‘solutions’. Further rounds of discussion generated ‘Distilled Good Practices’. These were then quantitatively assessed against four criteria: ‘Business benefit’, ‘Ease of implementation’, ‘Breadth’ and ‘Relevance’.

Developing ‘Action Plans’

Action Plans were then developed through a process of articulating, building and sharing ideas, supported by prompts and templates. Again, the wireless network gave everyone the chance to review and comment on plans developed by others. After the Workshop, we delivered a Verbatim Report which included all the outputs. Our Synthesis Report then analysed and developed the outputs further. The key output was a set of refined Good Practices together with the Action Plans needed to implement them.

Workshop feedback

The Workshop assessment showed that participants valued the ‘different techniques to gather and review the output’, the ‘use of technology for rapid data entry and collation’, and the production of ‘immediate results’. The anonymity provided by the system was a ‘nice effect’ because it ‘kept the stronger personalities from enforcing their will upon the group’ and contributed to ‘openness of inputs, no defensiveness’.