People pay good money to learn the lessons that you’ve experienced!
Have you ever had an experience that you never want to go through again? On the flip side, do you recall a time when things couldn’t have gone any better?
Performing a postmortem is a vital discipline for either minimizing the chances of a significant failure re-occurring or positioning us to optimally replicate a success. As Spaniard George Santayana said in 1905, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The Postmortem process may be painful to perform, but they are vital for organizational health. Leadership should model vulnerability in this process to encourage openness and transparency within the broader team.
The initial review should happen within the first month post-event so that all pertinent facts are gathered and an initial analysis occurs while everything is still fresh in our minds. The final post-mortem should occur within 3 to 6 months of the event. This exercise should be a deeper dive and will provide a more complete picture of what contributed to our success or failure.
Brutal honesty is needed for this to be effective………the good, the bad, and the ugly. Here are a few questions to help get the postmortem started:
- Did we make some poor assumptions? What assumptions were conservative or spot-on, leading to our success?
- Did anyone disagree with the direction that we took? How was that input received?
- What operational successes or mistakes did we make along the way?
- Did we have emergency exit ramps along our path so that we could fail fast and adjust our direction appropriately?
- What questions should we have asked before the decision was made to proceed?
- What steps from our initial decision-making process led to our success?
- Did we compromise our internal decision-making process or our values in pursuing this direction?
- How did we get here? What did we do well, not so well?
- Is an outside resource needed to help facilitate this process to reinforce objectivity throughout the process?
