The key to successfully implementing lessons learned is making the connection between those lessons and the work of those affected. People need to understand the value of what they have learned and how to apply it to their lives.
When I was fifteen years old, I had a jarring experience with a moving vehicle. That encounter illustrated something I previously hadn't understood about learning, something I continue to apply today. Let me explain.
The Bus Stop We Just Passed
About a year earlier, during my first year in high school in Cairo, Egypt, I took my first physics class. To say that I absolutely hated physics would be an understatement. It was a bunch of laws and formulas with no tangible connection to reality—or at least that's what I thought because I had never experienced an educational setting that related educational content to my daily experiences.
One of my new responsibilities as a fifteen-year-old was that I was to start taking public transportation. I had previously watched hundreds if not thousands of people get on and off buses every day, but I had never done that myself. After a first successful bus ride to my destination, I was feeling a sense of accomplishment and confidence. I boarded the bus home, with just one concern: I needed to alert the bus driver in advance about my stop. Diligently I watched the route and spoke up to let the driver know. As we approached my stop he started to slow down, but before he stopped, I realized we had missed it. He gestured by bobbing his head, indicating that he was not going to stop the bus and that I should get off anyway. As we slowly drifted further and further from my stop, I overcame my anxiety and jumped off the moving bus. I tried to stop myself and barely avoided a face-plant by instinctively continuing to move forward at a running speed, then gradually slowing to a stop.
For weeks I tried to understand why I couldn't control my body. I feared that if I didn't figure this out, it would happen again and the outcome would be worse. After obsessive rumination for about a week, I suddenly saw the connection between two actions and their consequences: trying to force an immediate stop after jumping off a bus will result in a face-plant, but running first and progressively reducing speed is the ticket to a safe landing. I had seen others do just that a gazillion times—running after they jumped out of a moving bus—and wondered why they were running. On autopilot, my brain had filed away the information and then, when I needed it, retrieved it, telling my body instinctively what to do.
I suddenly remembered Newton's First Law of Motion, which states that a body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts on it and a body in motion at a constant velocity will remain in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force. I had read it and regurgitated it on tests plenty of times, but at that moment I had experienced a depth of understanding that was not only cognitive but also visceral.
Learning to Live
Education can be an enlightening and rewarding experience. It can be a source of light and direction in a world of uncertainty. In a world that is ever changing and full of complexity and information overload, it is invaluable to constantly learn new things and learn them with an awareness of how they relate to the world. What is missing from most educational systems and workplace professional development is the connection of why is it important to learn what we're learning and how it relates to our daily experiences. What is the point of learning if we don't know how to apply that knowledge to our day-to-day lives? By the same token, life and knowledge are complex, and it won't always be clear why certain information is useful. Being throttled into an unforgiving situation might be the path to unlocking what we already know. It unleashes what we've filed away in the crevices of our minds and shows us that we know and are capable of things beyond our perceived limitations.
Working to Learn
As a project manager, I feverishly collect the nuggets of wisdom learned through research and experience. I cherish educational opportunities that provide useful, practical knowledge. Knowledge is power when we understand how to use it. As advances in our lives exponentially complicate business and project management, it becomes even more critical that we genuinely digest and confidently know what we learn, as well as embrace uncertainty and jolt ourselves in little experiments that expand what we know. We manage the risks carefully and rely on the structure and solid ground of the depth of our knowledge.
Experienced project managers can help facilitate this process and take their team on the necessary journey to assess what they truly know and where they need to experiment. They collaborate with the team, but they also play the role of the teacher to decrease the chances that anyone would experience a face-plant. The same concepts apply to teaching or any other job!
What are the necessary ingredients to successfully implement lessons learned?
- Culture: Start with the basics. Do you exist in an environment that encourages curiosity and open communication and respects the diversity of thinkers by consistently transforming valuable team ideas into action?
- You: Are you constantly updating your knowledge? Do you have a balanced focus on benefits to you, to your stakeholders, and to the organization? Do you evaluate ideas based on their merit or based on the status in the organizational hierarchy of the person who offered the idea? Do your actions align with what you say?
- Value over process: Lessons-learned templates are almost identical everywhere they are found. The real magic happens in how the information is gathered and leveraged. The best way to ensure that a lessons-learned document doesn't just collect dust after being created is by ensuring that it is of quality and that everyone sees its value.
- Collecting and reviewing lessons learned is an ongoing process, not reserved to a particular phase of the project.
- It is a team effort in which each person captures information that they deem useful for future efforts and provides feedback on priorities.
- It is a strategic effort. When I was less experienced, I thought I needed to capture everything, but now I prioritize based on project goals and risks. It is the 80/20 rule, 80 percent of the ROI comes from 20 percent of your lessons learned.
- When populating your lessons-learned template or discussing items, tell stories and use case studies, especially if you are not good at storytelling. There is a gap between intellectually grasping facts and knowing how to apply them. Stories and case studies provide the specifics and context that best practices fail to communicate.
If you build an open and collaborative environment, prioritize your lessons learned, and create useful documentation that everyone values, you will be on solid ground. You will also have the genuine trust of your colleagues, which will empower you to take calculated leaps of faith when you venture into uncertainty. Finally, you will have their support to remedy things if you face-plant!
Perryhan Ahmed is Adjunct Faculty at Grand Canyon University and a Consultant at Intersys.
© 2019 Perryhan Ahmed. The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 International License.