Incorporate Lessons Learned And Retrospectives To Improve Knowledge Sharing

Now that we are getting closer to the end of the year and of the Covid-19 crisis, the company’s vision board should include the lessons learned from 2020 to become more agile in future situations.

In November 2019, when Covid-19 was not yet a threat, and right before Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced they were stepping down from their management roles at Google, I visited Google headquarters in Mountainview, California.

Apart from being an extraordinary experience that may not be repeatable after pandemics, given that right now only a portion of the employees is working in those beautifully equipped buildings, I learned a lot about their culture that should never be lost. One of the take-aways was the importance of knowledge management, especially in knowledge-based and project-oriented organizations, and the role of lessons learned. Lessons learned are a piece of knowledge or understanding gained by experience. It is a process of capturing information regarding successful and unfavorable events, analyzing and transforming it into knowledge to prevent something from happening again or promote it as best practice.

A lesson learned must be:

• Significant: have a measurable impact. Can be both successful and unfavorable events
• Valid: factually and technically correct
• Applicable: identifies a specific design, process, or decision that: Reduces or eliminates the potential for failure, reinforces a positive result or provides data, not opinion.
• Able to ask three fundamental questions: what happened, why and how
• A means to emphasize knowledge sharing:  applying the learning locally within the project site or sharing globally or across projects and sites.

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What to consider to build a successful lessons learned process

The company’s culture should promote that the lesson learned’s quality is far more critical than the number of lessons learned. Particularly, it should reinforce psychological safety to ensure even and especially the bad lessons are shared.

Google implements closed-loop learning (CLL) as a process of applying the acquired knowledge at appropriate life cycle phases to prevent risks or repeat success. Events that significantly impact cost, schedule and quality require a CLL session.

Lessons learned and retrospectives in agile cultures

Agile cultures that implement methods like Scrum have already incorporated a lessons learned method in their “sprint” process called the retrospective. According to the Scrum guide published by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, the Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint.

David Horowitz, CEO and Co-Founder of Retrium, a retrospective software, says that “retrospectives are a chance for your team to inspect how it works and to adapt going forward.”

The retrospective is a meeting at the end of each sprint (in Scrum, projects are divided into smaller modules called sprints) that aims at finding the lessons learned of the sprint: how it went with regards to people, relationships, process, and tools;  identify and prioritize the major items that went well and potential improvements, and create a plan for implementing improvements in the upcoming modules and projects.

In most cases, a Scrum Masters or an Agile Coach would facilitate retrospectives to ensure everyone in the team feels safe to collaborate. Most retrospectives focus on discovering answers to three questions: what is working well, what is not working well, and what should be changed.

A Postmortem is another process, right after a project is finalized, to determine which parts of the project were successful or unsuccessful. As per a Harvard article, Pixar used to do postmortems after a film to ask the team involved to come up with five things they’d do again and five things they wouldn’t do again.

When many employees leave the company, rotation is high, or even when teams are distributed, the knowledge must be maintained intentionally. The challenge is collecting and disseminating knowledge to benefit those across the organization—both inside and outside of the project—who require relevant information to perform their work. Companies should start incorporating a lesson learned process, either through periodic closed-loop learning sessions, retrospectives, postmortems, develop period swot analysis or use any other tool that ensures lessons learned are analyzed, shared, and implemented.

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