New Game-Plan: Learning Lessons

Services

About Us

Our services and capabilities:

• Enabling the learning of lessons from past experience to improve future performance

• Using Workshops to stimulate and engage thinking - making sense of diverse inputs

• Facilitating practical plans to develop and embed capabilities for future success

• Providing training services to develop personal capabilities

Why learn lessons?

Everyone knows that an organisation’s effectiveness depends on learning lessons from experience, yet most fail to do it in practice. All too often, in fact, what are logged as ‘lessons learned’ turn out to be ‘commonly-repeated mistakes’! 'Documenting' lessons is not the same as 'learning' from them.

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 service help?

We enable organisations to identify, share and apply lessons - so they stick. The main elements are:

• Reviewing and analysing the current situation to gather experiences and begin to articulate lessons which need to be learned.
• Deliberating on the lessons with relevant internal and/or external stakeholders, ideally seeking a range of perspectives on the issues.
• Validating the lessons and defining good practices and action plans to implement them. This could involve designing new or modified approaches.
• Engaging relevant managers and funders (if they are not already fully engaged) to ensure the the organisation 'owns' the lessons and the proposed actions to tackle them.
• Developing tools for implementation, including communication tools.
• Providing training to promote and embed new approaches and mindsets, so that the lessons are effectively learned in practice.

All this work will embrace, as appropriate, processes, systems, cultures/mindsets/behaviours, responsibilities, accountabilities, supporting IM/IT platforms, opportunities, value and targeting. It is invaluable is striving for excellence at all levels – whether for an organisation, team, or individual.

Specific applications include:

• 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.
• Reviewing funding programmes - learning from the experience of funders and funded organisations alike to ensure that future support continues to be cost-effective and deliver desired outcomes

We strongly recommend the use of Brain-Pool Workshops in this process. These:

• Provide a structured process, striking the right balance between creativity and logical processing. They are valuable in articulating and validating lessons, developing the business case for change, defining specific useful actions, and getting personal buy-in.
• Combine anonymous and group work. This ensures full and honest disclosure of root causes, defuses any attempts to 'blame' individuals, and keeps the focus on collaborative development of solutions.
• Draw on our skills in articulating and framing propositions, so that they can be systematically reviewed and developed. Our input provokes significant new thinking and increased productivity.
• Involve 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.

Case studies

Learning lessons in a global biosciences company

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 chemicals had led to serious costs and delays in manufacture, supply-chain distribution, and use. We worked with the participants, before, during and after the Workshop, in a series of steps, to develop ‘Symptom-Effect Statements’, ‘Generic Problem Statements’, ‘Cause Statements’, ‘Distilled Cause Statements’, ‘Good Practices’, ‘Distilled Good Practices’ and ‘Action Plans’ to implement the Distilled Good Practices. Our skills in articulating and distilling these statements for systematic review contributed greatly to the productivity of the Workshop.

Enabling funding bodies to learn lessons from their programmes

The UK Big Lottery Fund ran nine Regional Workshops to consult stakeholders on the Fund's proposals for a new strategy and funding priorities. The Workshops were facilitated by our partners Crystal Interactive Ltd. We provided our 'Synthesise to Act' service to collate and distil the lessons and other feedback which the Fund's stakeholders offered. The final Strategy strongly reflected our analysis and distillation of the lessons.