Lessons Learned
“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
A weekly lessons learned is too intense. Quarterly is neglectful and too loose. Independent of the start or completion of a project, you should conduct a lessons learned exercise monthly. This is culture, disguised as a template.
Some organizations conduct a Lessons Learned exercise at the end of large project and ONLY then. Isolating major reflection and feedback exercise to once or twice per year equates to suppressing problems and procrastinating fixing them. Doing this also might increase the effort and awkwardness of such an exercise. Instead, conduct a Lessons Learned exercise on a monthly basis. After a couple occasions, the monthly rhythm results in the exercise requiring modest time, effort, and awkwardness.
In innovation work, projects suffer very similar issues. There is a pattern in the problems. The pattern is worth translating into a prescriptive starting point for a Lessons Learned exercise. Don’t populate every cell in this template. It’s valuable that your whole team simply be thoughtful with the whole template. Populating 2 or 3 items in a single exercise is enough. Then do it again next month.
Instead of micro-managing tasks, this asset helps your ensemble micro-mentor itself. The self-confidence and the humility to conduct this routine monthly is absolutely culture-shaping. On and off the dance floor, learning never stops.