Who wants to speak of its failures? Who wants to learn from them?

When studying the essential rules of management, a basic lesson is that one related to the control loop process. Management implies to plan tasks or actions, and to ensure that plans are followed through in order to meet objectives. If progressive goals are not achieved, it is required to review the actions done and to make corrective decisions, sometimes checking again the main objectives.

The control loop process on every project or business is about (OUBS, 2004):

1 - Setting objectives: What are you trying to achieve (it is useful to have some criteria for success so that you will know whether these objectives are achieved or not).
2 - Planning, identify markers and carry out tasks: The map of actions. Markers or some specific targets along time help us to know if we are moving towards achieving the objectives.
3 - Monitoring progress (many times the little missed detail): Even though to have planned markers is useful, they are not enough. It is necessary a process of checking how the actions are developing and comparing this progress against the markers. Look at he word “how”, which is key one.
4 -Act on results of monitoring: If something is going wrong, or it is not according to plan, then it is needed to make corrective decisions, whether to:

a. Adjust tasks, or
b. Revise objectives, or perhaps,
c. Do nothing.

All great stuff.

Chris Collison and Geof Parcell have written excellent lessons about knowledge management at BP (Learning to fly, 2001). One of the key strategies mentioned, linked to the process of learning from successes and failures, is the so called After Action Review (AAR).

Nothing new since the US Army is implementing this methodology from many years “to improve their ability to learn in the midst of action and improve teamworking… At the peak of the conflict –said Collison and Parcell-, it became apparent that foot soldiers in the field had far more knowledge about was going on that headquarters” (p.76). (I wonder if the US Army is still successful using these knowledge management strategies, even though some kind of groupthink culture prevails).

Anyway.

What is important in AAR is the special effort to shed light on failures through the progressive monitoring process, and not necessarily at the end of the project or big task. It means: if current actions are going on according to plan, great!, don’t touch the machine. Do nothing. But maybe –or surely- things are some deviated from the original markers and plans. The four AAR necessary questions to have a deep monitoring process should be:

1 What was supposed to happen?
2 What actually happened?
3 Why were there differences? (Key question)
4 What did we learn?

Learned lessons must be applied on the following corrective actions.

“The hard work of failure analysis”

This is the interesting headline recently found on the Harvard Business School’s newsletter (Aug 22, 2005). The article describes a work developed by Amy Edmondson and Mark Cannon about the process of analysing what went wrong in social systems (“Failing to Learn and Learning to Fail –Intelligently-).

Authors indicate that learning potentially available in organisations may not be realised unless a thoughtful analysis and discussion of failure occurs. But this analysis can only be effective -as the authors accurately mentioned-, “if people speak up openly about what they know and if others listen, enabling a new understanding of what happened”. An atmosphere open and trusted is necessary. How many times is it possible in organisations?

Conclusions pointed out that in processes of monitoring failures:

A People tend to be more comfortable attending to evidence that enables them to believe what they want to believe, denying responsibility for failures and attributing the problem to others or to “the system”.

B Conducting an analysis of a failure requires a spirit of inquiry and openness, patience and a tolerance for ambiguity. However, most managers admire and are rewarded for decisiveness, efficiency and action rather than for deep reflection and painstaking analysis.

C Psychologist have spent decades documenting psychological biases and errors that reduce the accuracy of human perception, sense making, estimation, and attribution. These can hinder the human ability to analyse failure effectively.

Monitoring process and rigorous analysis of failure requires people to assume truths and personal responsibility, which is easier to mention than put into practice.

A control loop should not avoid or ignore others strategies to achieve objectives, such as those ones mentioned by Edmondson and Cannon: “to develop processes, resources and incentives to bring multiple perspectives and minds together, to carefully analyse what went wrong and how to prevent the occurrence of similar failures in the future”.

It means: Learning.

Such processes require an environment and a culture of openness and participation, people ready to share their opinions in forums or discussion groups without fear for recrimination, but also people with effective technical skills and expertise in analysis of causes and consequences. People free to talk and people really willing to listen them.

Shared leadership (the dream and the trust)

"Who built the town of Thebes of Seven Gates?
The names of kings are written in the books.
Was it the kings who dragged the slabs of rock?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed,
Who built her up again so many times?"

"Young Alexander conquered India.
All by himself?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Not even a cook to help him with his meals?
Philip of Spain wept when his Armada
Went down. Did no one else weep?
Frederick the Great won the Seven Years War.
Who else was the winner?"


Bertolt Brecht: "Questions from a worker"