The no-blame debrief: what did we learn?
Teams that can talk about what went wrong repeat fewer mistakes. The question that makes it possible is short, and the order you ask things in is everything.
Within a day, facts in order, one change with a name on it, and a thing you learned yourself. The individual conversation is separate.
After something goes wrong, there are two conversations available. One starts with “what happened?” and ends with a name. The other starts with “what did we learn?” and ends with a change. The team will tell you the truth in the second kind for as long as you never run the first kind.
Within a day
- Get the people involved together, briefly. Same day or the next; after that, memory and defensiveness both set in.
- Open with the question and nothing else: “What would we do differently next time?”
- Facts first, in order: what happened, then what we knew at each point. Not who; what.
- One change, agreed, written down, with a name on it. One. A list of seven is a way of doing none.
If it was one person’s mistake
That conversation is separate, private and later, and it is about what they will do differently, not what they did. In the group debrief, the mistake is a fact in the timeline, not the subject. If you single someone out in the room, you have run the first kind of conversation, and it will be the last honest debrief you get.
Say what you learned
Every debrief, one thing you learned or would do differently yourself. If you cannot think of one, you were not paying attention. A manager who never learned anything from a problem is a manager whose team learns to hide problems.
Write it down
The one change, with the name and the date. Review it at the next debrief: did it happen, did it help.
The clearest thirty minutes in your week.
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