The philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
This is sometimes referred to as Santayana’s Law of Repetitive Consequences; and is nowhere more evident than in project based work. It’s been said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. The increasing pace of change in the workplace often makes it difficult to learn from experience as processes and personnel are constantly changing.
In my opinion, to successfully learn from experience requires a regular and consistent approach that can be incorporated into any work management methodology. Here are a few suggestions to help any project team learn from experience:
- Establish a venue for sharing lessons-learned: It doesn’t matter whether you call it a post-mortem, a project review, or a project retrospective, most organizations don’t do them—but they should.
- Share what has been learned: Although most organizations don’t bother with a project retrospective, those that do don’t always create an environment that encourages real learning—and even fewer share what was learned.
- Don’t make learning the next corporate initiative: It’s natural for organizations to try to formalize the learning process into the next corporate project. Although the natural learning process should be encouraged, “corporate” is all to often the same as “bureaucratic,” which employees will be more likely to avoid.
- Don’t make learning a one-time activity: Project learning should be ongoing and interactive—don’t let it become an isolated activity that happens rarely.
Every organization has different needs. Some rely on their project software to help facilitate the learning process. I think that’s good, but even organizations that don’t use any specific project management tools need to create an environment where project learning can regularly take place. Because this is a challenge for a number of organizations, please share some of your suggestions and successes.
Good post Ty with some excellent points. Unfortunately Lessons Learned are regularly viewed as just another step in the project process rather than an incredibly valuable tool that accelerate results and minimise risk in the future. For learning to occur the wider organisation must recognise the value. It must form part of the overall culture and not just the culture of the project team or style of the project manager. It’s always frustrating and disappointing when genuine effort is put into the gathering the lessons and setting out an action plan only to see that action plan consigned to the filing cabinet and the same things repeated in the next project. If the project sponsor and steering group want a lessons learned exercise then they better be willing to follow it through – they must walk their talk or experience ground-hog day over and over again. Deanne
Deanne, I couldn’t agree more. Thanks for your contribution to the post. For an organization to take advantage of lessons learned, they must be committed to not only go through the exercise of collecting them, but actually do something with them. I love the ground-hog day comparison_
I am just a student in Management in Information System and I learning as much as I possibly can. I like your post, however, only because it is important for blogs and websites to have good credibility to spell words correctly. I could not help noticing the words “…organizatios don’t bother” (organizations) and “environment that encorages” (encourages)… just a comment.
Thanks Francisco. We’ve fixed the typos.