Lessons learnt should change behaviour, not fill SharePoint

Organisations don’t learn... people do.

‘Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like,’ said Edward, Lord Thurlow, an 18th century Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain. If you’ve ever noticed the same mistakes being repeated in big organisations, despite it being full of reasonable, decent people, it might be worth reflecting on why we still haven’t learnt this lesson.

Many years ago, as a naive program analyst, I thought I’d solved the problem of lessons learnt. My organisation had captured hundreds of records from projects over five years. But it was unstructured data - if only the time poor project managers could have it at their fingertips whenever they started a new project, they could avoid the mistakes of the past!

And so I ingeniously created a lessons learnt database. It was categorised. It was structured. It was tagged. It was accessible! And it was probably never used, though at the end of every lesson learnt that I facilitated, I dutifully tagged and filed these lessons away.

I got better and better at running lessons learnt. I learnt five whys, a technique pioneered at Toyota, and will always recommend this as a skill to develop for anyone running workshops.

• State the problem clearly: Write down the exact issue you see.

• Ask the first why: Find out why the problem happened.

• Keep asking why: Use each answer to ask "why" again.

• Stop at the root cause: Stop when you find the real, fixable source.

Alas, when I began to uncover the real root causes, I discovered something even worse.

Our problems were structural! Individual people knew what to do, and what mistakes to avoid, but the system of work ensured that mistakes continued to happen. In order to get the business case across the line, project budgets were squeezed to remove change management and testing resource costs. Or, functions like procurement who were perceived as not adding value were not engaged earlier on, resulting in failure to identify legal or compliance obligations that caused far greater delays to the overall project.

I also disovered what research from Prosci, the change management would later reinforce for me - the number one contributor to project success was an effective and engaged sponsor.

Why? Because organisations don’t learn, but people do. Those effective sponsors had learnt from the lessons on the projects they’d been on, and ensured that they stepped in when needed to solve problems.

So how can you ensure your lessons learnt change behaviour, rather than fill up SharePoint?

First - focus on five whys. If you are going to capture lessons, at least ensure that the real root cause is identified, even if it only helps everyone in the room to take that lesson with them to the next project they work on. One of those people may be a sponsor one day.

Second - run shorter, more frequent lessons learnt, or better yet, retrospectives. The end of the project is too late to make changes on the project, and the people involved disband. But people can learn, and teams of people can learn. Quick retrospectives, deep dives, or reviews regularly throughout the project mean that people can learn to work better together and change their behaviour while the possiblity of changing the outcomes is still there.

Third - if you don’t have an effective and engaged sponsor, invite the people who can make changes into the lessons learnt process - and keep it about structure, not people.

And always remember - organisations don’t learn... but people can.