Does your team learn from its mistakes? How do you share individual learnings in the workplace? How do your teams share across departments?
Learning from our missteps and failures is a common gap for most teams and organizations.
A necessary task if we wish to stop repeating the same mistakes, it’s also not a simple nor easy task.
- On an individual level, it requires vulnerability.
- On a team level, it requires psychological safety.
- On an organizational level, it requires systems that encourage, applaud, and make accessible the learnings that are shared.
It’s not impossible. It does require commitment, intention, and care.
I once led a small team of 5, and we implemented a learning system into our project management platform (Asana – my fave of them all) via asynchronous, continuous debriefing.
🛠It took time to build, and it took intention to sustain it. Simply put – each Deliverable card had a multitude of items requested of all collaborators in the task description.
🔂 One of those items was the continuous debrief model asking for individual collaborators to document wins; opportunities; lessons learned.
- Add to it as you progress the work and note any significant items in the 3 categories.
- Be sure to applaud one another’s efforts.
- Emoji usage = bonus.
——So how does all of this apply to the HOPE framework?? ——
I often coached my team members to look back at what we’d already learned among our team.
- What resources could be pulled from documentation?Â
- What might other team members have to share from their own experience?Â
- What about other teams?
You can move the needle forward.
To become wizards of their craft, Learning Organizations and Deliberately Developmental Organizations touch all 3 levels: individual; team; and org-wide.
Start with one small step
Socialize the HOPE framework for individual reflection and growth, and invite your teams to invest 5 minutes in team meetings for 1 person to share a recent learning.
If you don’t try it, you are on the path to continuously experiencing the same mistakes, again and again…with holding hope of a better way.
