Synaptus

At the workshop I am attending this weekend the concepts of lessons learned has come up several times. Several times someone in the group has said, "we have the lesson’s learned from the last time we did this, haven’t you reviewed this?" In each case the manager in charge of the project replied, "I didn’t know they were out there." Despite the diligent efforts to capture lessons learned, the organization isn’t benefiting from prior experiences as much as they could.

So when is a lesson learned considered learned? Stopping at the end of a project effort and identifying the things you wish you knew at the start of the project is a very powerful technique. Writing these lessons down for those coming after us is an important way to archive this information. But without a way to make sure that the people who will be responsible for the next project understand the relevant lessons learned, this is not productive time. There are three suggestions for handling this.

1. The people who are taking on projects must take the time to look for and review lessons learned from prior similar projects. This means that lessons learned must be stored where they can be found and tagged so that the relevant lessons can be identified.

2. There could be someone in your organization who is familiar with the lessons learned that are out there and provide some context to new managers.

3. Whenever possible, there should be a meeting with the new manager, a person with prior experience, and a someone who is familiar with the library of lessons learned where a conversation takes place. Even if 1 and 2 are taken care of, people learn much more from hearing stories than from reading a formal document.

Remember, documenting interesting lessons is valuable, but nothing is learned until it is available for someone to use it when it matters.

Tom Peters is an inspiring thought leader. A post on his blog today highlights how important it is for management to be able to align strategy and culture.

"A beautifully crafted strategy can fail when the employees in various divisions within an organization clash. Logically, we think that strategy should drive behavior, but, in reality, it’s the culture—underlying norms, values, belief systems—that dictates how effectively people work together. Employees’ behavior has direct impact on the bottom line, costs, revenue streams, level of productivity, customer satisfaction, even the brand—every aspect of the business is affected. If strategy and culture are not aligned, the culture may support behaviors that conflict with what has to get done—and actually block execution of the strategy."

I have worked in a Fortune 500 in the last year where the focus was on making sure everyone got along. Clearly there was some understanding that conflict wasted a tremendous amount of energy in businesses. Anything that lead to conflict was undiscussable. This made it impossible to point out where what someone was doing wasn’t helping get the job done. It also made change very difficult to implement. The behavior’s that were intended to reduce the conflict clearly blocked the execution of the strategy.

Notably, this is a ubiquitious problem that effects  almost every company we engage in. Most companies lack an effective way to connect strategy and culture in an actionable way. Developing and communicating strategy is itself a daunting task. Deliberately shaping culture can be overwhelming. If you agree that culture must be aligned with strategy, what are you doing to make it happen? Do you have a systematic way to make sure the culture and behaviors are creating results aligned with the strategy.