Have you ever experienced a situation when your company or team has encountered a problem, struggled to come up with a solution (a solution that didn’t really work too well, but one that you could move on), only to discover later that someone else in the company had experienced the same / similar situation, and they came up with a “better” fix? And if you had used their “fix”, you would have moved faster, better or cheaper…and with superior results?

That situation is a very common one. Companies are often not very good at capturing knowledge and experience gained through project work, planning sessions, or the everyday problems or issues we all encounter at work. There is a process that can help...Welcome to the “Strategic Lessons Learned” Process.

A “Lesson” is the result of a learning process – a past experience plus reflection, which:

• Expands the current understanding and / or behavior in a significant way
• Creates a new understanding and / or behavior

A Lessons Learned Session is a process to debrief' a team to surface and document important tacit knowledge that will be valuable to future teams. Tacit' Knowledge is what is in employees’ heads…the “how” something is done. After completing any project or process, individual team members have acquired certain 'tacit' knowledge that will make them more effective the next time on a similar project.

The outcomes of a successful Lessons Learned Session are:

• Heightened cross-team learning
• Less time spent reinventing the wheel
• Fewer repeat mistakes
• More rapid education of new team members
• Higher quality output
• Increased efficiency
• The possibility / choice of at least one better practice in a similar situation

The output of a Lessons Learned Session can take the form of:

• Meeting notes
• General advice in a short "Best Practice" document
• More specific advice in a longer "How-To" knowledge document
• Example documents, work-plans, agendas, etc., that embody the key take-aways

The key objective is that the output should be useful to others in your organization – currently and / or in the future.

Let Wolf Management help you find a better way to maximize what you learn!!