Take this challenge:

Any mistakes to learn from?

By Dr. Sharon Gotteiner

Some business failures are too painful to allow going back to routine, without an appropriate change. But changes we really need, also face the greatest resistance. Here are some guidelines for making such changes happen.

Most managements aim at doing all they can to understand what exactly went wrong, and what exactly should be done to prevent traumatic failures from repeating. They suffered enough financially and morally. They can do that by triggering a lessons-learned study – there is nothing new about it. But surprisingly, lessons-learned studies are not always carried out, and if they do, they are often led by parties who are not likely to produce objective and unbiased conclusions and are inherently prone to conclude that external parties should be held responsible. For example:

How comfortable can we feel with such conclusions, and embrace them without any doubt? Can we go ahead with rigor, high-profile corrective actions that derive from such conclusions? Could we now feel that we have taken the right actions to prevent such incidents from happening again? Probably not. And we only have this opportunity to go down to the bottom of organizational defects and fix them before history hits again.

The first message is clear: We need an independent, unbiased, senior party to check what exactly went wrong and what exactly should be changed. Then lessons-learned studies should meet the following guidelines:

1. Root-reasons must be identified. We should not accept findings that leave us with the question: “But what caused that?”.
2. We need to keep the process constructive. Among other, we need it to address the processes and organizational units, rather than individuals.
3. Conclusions must lead to a clear, corrective-action plan, including specific articulation: Who needs to do What and When.
4. Corrective actions must, among other, relate to organizational policies and procedures and required changes enforcement.
5. Ultimately, a company’s top-management should approve lessons-learned studies before finalized and win their support. Such support is the key to keeping the while process effective.
6. We should consider how that process can contribute to a deeper learning culture, enrich the organizational DNA, and strengthen its immune system.

So, do we still have any mistakes to learn from?

Good luck!

© Dr. Sharon Gotteiner, Corpocheck.org . All Rights Reserved. This publication is intended for individual use only. Please subscribe for integrating Corpocheck’s challenges with the organizational innovation platform and process in place.

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