Wednesday
Oct062010
Tip: Debrief
Wednesday, October 6, 2010 at 9:00AM
If you ever saw a nature program about bees dancing, then you know the importance of debriefing for organizational learning. The dancers are the bees that found honey. The directions of the dance, the vibration of their bodies and the samples - all tell the other bees where to find the riches and they all go out together to bring it back to the hive.
Photo by Brenda Starr Flickr CC
When scouts are sent out, the debriefing is what make their job useful. Unfortunately, in general, most people don't like to write reports and important experiences are lost. Every organization send out many scouts, think about all the sales reps, service technicians, visitors to trade fairs and conferences - just think about the wealth of knowledge they might bring the organization if we improve knowledge management.
Classic report writing is not very practical, it takes a lot of time and each report holds many different types of information, which makes them difficult to classify and distribute in a logical way. The new emerging tools like Socialcast and Yammer, which are facebook like tools, carries the promise of organizing communication in a simpler way, a bit like the Lotus Note databases. Both Socialcast and Yammer are intended to be used within the organization, if you are working with virtual teams with members belonging to other organizations I would recommend Teambox, even if that is a tool more for managing specific projects. In my own organization, we use both Socialcast and Teambox - I believe that it is more practical to make use of the different tools available than being locked into some large monolithic enterprise system.
It is not just the scouts that needs to be debriefed, it is everyone involved in both successes and failures. At the Outcome Thinking Blog, the author claim that the four steps to debriefing are:
From the school of Total Quality Management there are two classic tools worth knowing. The first one is 5W+H, meaning that the questions to ask are: Why, What, When, Where, Who and How. Kipling wrote a wonderful poem about these, his six serving-men. The second is the Why-Why tool, where the ideas is to ask why five times in a row, thus drilling down to the root cause of the problem.
Does your organization debrief? Do you have any experience or knowledge of the process to share?
Photo by Brenda Starr Flickr CCDebrief scouts
When scouts are sent out, the debriefing is what make their job useful. Unfortunately, in general, most people don't like to write reports and important experiences are lost. Every organization send out many scouts, think about all the sales reps, service technicians, visitors to trade fairs and conferences - just think about the wealth of knowledge they might bring the organization if we improve knowledge management.
Practical tools for collecting knowledge
Classic report writing is not very practical, it takes a lot of time and each report holds many different types of information, which makes them difficult to classify and distribute in a logical way. The new emerging tools like Socialcast and Yammer, which are facebook like tools, carries the promise of organizing communication in a simpler way, a bit like the Lotus Note databases. Both Socialcast and Yammer are intended to be used within the organization, if you are working with virtual teams with members belonging to other organizations I would recommend Teambox, even if that is a tool more for managing specific projects. In my own organization, we use both Socialcast and Teambox - I believe that it is more practical to make use of the different tools available than being locked into some large monolithic enterprise system.
What information to collect
It is not just the scouts that needs to be debriefed, it is everyone involved in both successes and failures. At the Outcome Thinking Blog, the author claim that the four steps to debriefing are:
- Analyze what happened and why
- Really look at pinpointing the ROOT of the problem not the symptom
- Think about what caused you or the other party to act the way you did
- What can you do differently next time in order to get different results and why do you think that will work
From the school of Total Quality Management there are two classic tools worth knowing. The first one is 5W+H, meaning that the questions to ask are: Why, What, When, Where, Who and How. Kipling wrote a wonderful poem about these, his six serving-men. The second is the Why-Why tool, where the ideas is to ask why five times in a row, thus drilling down to the root cause of the problem.
Does your organization debrief? Do you have any experience or knowledge of the process to share?
Reader Comments (2)
The 5 Whys technique is very helpful and effective in RCA (Root Cause Analysis). It's also one of the techniques I often use in designing complex software architectures as it usually leads me to the core issues and helps me to remove complexity.
Here's a post I wrote on this particular subject (http://thousandinsights.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/root-cause-analysis-5-whys/)
Thanks José, great post, have you noticed that the root-cause always seems to be a human behavior? And you are right, the technique is older than Toyota, it has been mentioned in several ancient philosophical and religious texts.