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Principles To Build a Robust Timeline
- Ask each individual involved to share what they knew, when they knew it and how they knew it. There are a few points to emphasize:
- Ask for descriptions without explanations
- Ask for timestamps (or estimates) of when they knew what they knew
- Systematically ask how they understood the incident at each stage.
- Encourage diverse points of view to get a fuller picture of the incident. Honor all opinions by asking for and acknowledging them.
- Reframe the facilitator's role so they just listen, discover and verify by synthesizing. As they are often seniors, they likely carry inputs and biases from their people.
- Listen for, and help participants be aware of blaming, cognitive biases, and counterfactuals, such as ‘we could have, ’ ‘we should have, ’ ‘if only’ and ‘we didn’t. ’
- Use empathy and humor throughout the learning review to defuse tense situations.
- Question how, not why an incident occurred. Asking how unearths the conditions that contributed to success or failure. Probing why gets you tangled in bias.
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Achieving Closure
- Determine and rank the steps that should be taken to change the conditions that brought the incident in the first place.
- To keep the learning review focused, prioritize and discuss these action items in separate follow-up meetings with the relevant people.
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Build a Timeline
A timeline is an account of what happened by the people who were involved and impacted. Create a timeline with input from as many people from diverse points of view. With some training, anyone in the organization can do it.
A good timeline shows not just what happened, but...
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Postmortems vs Learning Reviews
Most companies conduct postmortems at a project’s end to analyze and outline the factors that contributed to its failure. But this reflection, examination and evaluation might not be as useful as most wait for failures to conduct them and stop the analysis once the guilty are identi...
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Don’t Trade Context For Convenience
Blame and biases — such as hindsight bias — give us a convenient story about what happened in any negative situation. To the extent that a story feels comfortable, we believe that it's true but when we get to that convenient point we stop learning.
Skipping the learnin...
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Setting Context To Maximize Learning
- Repeatedly remind your team that they’re part of a learning organization to make them focus on learning.
- Remind your people that you are all operating within complex systems, thus failures can be unpredictable.
- Focus on the context of the incident and assure everyone that no...
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The Hidden Harm Of Punishments
To extract a full account of the incident, remove blame and punishment on an organizational level from your retrospectives. You get there easier by reducing the fear and biases that creep in during the investigation of failures, and by choosing reconciliation and immunity over retribution....
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Speed Up Self Knowledge: A Great Conversation
We can get to know ourselves by conversing with others, but not how we think a conversation should be. The key to a great conversation is asking the right questions and then listening well.
Some examples: Think about what flaws of yours you want to be treated in a bet...
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