Not long ago, I worked with a marketing group to help them think through their relationships with clients.
“We just finished a project, and it’s on to the next one,” they told me. The schedule was relentless, so there was little time to celebrate or to learn from what they’d just accomplished.
Later, when it came time to execute on a similar project, the marketing group found themselves repeating old processes without considering how they could improve them.
By being “too busy” to debrief their work, the team was missing out on the crucial act of celebration — and also missing out on learning from their work.
Thankfully, there’s a smarter way.
Getting started with a review process
Instituting a review process doesn’t mean adding weeks to your project cycle. A one-hour meeting, where the project team works through five questions, can lead to tremendous insights and a sense of accomplishment and closure.
Here are the questions I recommend:
1. What was the best part of this experience? Tell the story.
Whether you’re debriefing a one-night event or a one-year project, ask each person to identify the most rewarding, most successful or most engaging part of the experience.
Reflecting on the project or event as a story can help team members put a “period” at the end of their experience. The work is over, and now we reflect.
Questions like this help surface significant outcomes that are worth celebrating. Even if the project didn’t deliver the results you wanted, there may be other experiences to celebrate, like team learning or individual skill development.
2. What factors contributed to success?
Next, ask the group to reflect on the best experiences altogether and identify the factors that contributed to success. Were we more comfortable with small risks? Did we communicate more thoughtfully across departments? Did we rely on both best practices and innovations?
Be literal about this question — develop a list of factors that contributed to success, keeping the list on a whiteboard or in a shared digital note. Don’t forget these: consider how you can incorporate the concepts into future work.
3. Imagine we did this again in the future. What would you keep the same, and what would you change? Describe the future to me.
Hindsight is 20/20, right? If you could use the wisdom from the past on a do-over, what would you do the same? What would you do differently?
Some organizations favor using a “post mortem” approach to project reviews, asking the question, “What went wrong?” That’s important info to uncover, of course. But the negative framing of the question can invite finger-pointing.
As much as I wish we were all better at direct conversation and healthy conflict, most teams I encounter struggle with it. Additionally, we almost always know what went wrong — the real challenge is to figure out what to do differently next time.
By focusing on what we’d do in the future, we address the problems without finger-pointing and invite fresh thinking.
4. Based on our plans for the future, what are the three most important areas for us to focus on to continue improving?
Generating a 37-item list of things we could do in the future is interesting. Narrowing that list to the two or three most impactful ideas is transformative.
When everything is a priority, nothing is … so make tough choices: what will really have the most significant impact if we do it differently next time?
This can be a fascinating conversation for project teams to discuss, because it often reveals a lot about the individual’s perspective. As the senior leader, the workload may have felt entirely doable. But when a junior team member argues for longer lead time and more staff support, it can be clear that his experience was different than yours—and that’s worth paying attention to.
5. Looking beyond this event, what have we learned that will help us in other projects?
One way to evaluate how your team is doing overall is to ask, Are we getting better over time? For that to happen, you must learn continuously, finding the transferable concepts from one project to the next.
What does that look like? Let’s say one project goes extremely well because of how the project manager handled communication. The daily 10-minute stand-up meetings she implemented with Slack updates in between kept everyone informed without being overwhelmed by a lot of noise.
Now your team is moving on to a different type of project: Can the same communication cadence work in a different context? If so, it’s a transferable concept.
Finding the transferable concepts for the group, for sub-teams or individuals can accelerate learning.
Depending on the size of your project and the number of people involved, you can move through these five questions in under an hour. Additionally, these tips may help you run an effective debrief meeting:
- Put the debrief meeting on the schedule months in advance.
- Make sure someone is assigned to take notes during the conversation.
- If you have a huge project or team, you may want to debrief different phases of the project separately.
- Take time to identify the most important decisions.
- End the meeting by turning talk into action — what ideas are moving forward, and who is responsible for the next steps?
- Make celebration and debriefing part of your group norms to prevent drama later.
Here are those five questions again. Now one question for you: when will you test this?
- What was the best part of this experience? Tell the story.
- What factors contributed to success?
- Imagine we did this again in the future. What would you keep the same, and what would you change? Describe the future to me.
- Based on that image, what are the three most important areas for us to focus on, to continue improving?
- Looking beyond this event, what have we learned that will help us in other projects?
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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