How can you improve team decision-making skills through past experience?

"Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you." - Aldous Huxley 3 Questions to Ask on this: How can teams effectively leverage past experiences, including both successes and failures, to enhance their decision-making skills and processes? What strategies can be employed to ensure that the lessons learned from past experiences are integrated into the decision-making framework and applied to new situations? Can you share examples of teams that have significantly improved their decision-making through the application of past experiences, and what best practices or approaches did they adopt to achieve this improvement?

Learn especially from past mistakes. Failure is crucial to learn, grow, and innovate. Post-mortem analyses are a vluable tool to critically analyse why things did not produce the expected results. Making root causes analyses, explicitly identyfying the leassons we can learn from mistakes, contributes to create a library of experiences that will shape our decisions going forward.

Post mortem, what worked well, what didn't. Identify next steps and update process documentation. And never forget to celebrate success in its many forms!

One thing I repeatedly witnessed throughout my career journey that a lot of lessons can be missed just due to lack of active listening skill. I find AAR framework is very useful, as it enhance a collective thinking. However, the answers to the four questions alone are not enough to carry on a jointly produced decision. I see the following are also important: 1- Perform a reflectivity session and encourage all team members to share. 2-Create a room for "listening" and practice to be a good listener. 3-Avoid any blaming or criticizing and keep your team focused on the strategic level of the past experience. 4-Consider the resources allocated for the past experience and compare with impact. It is crucial to reflect from this point of view.

Measure the impact of the error. If low and easily correctible, take risks. If you make a mistake, learn from it and keep improving your skills (fail often, fail fast, fail cheap and fail forward)

Glocal approach is the best, Think Global but act local- learn from the best practices & ideas in the world but at the point of execution localize them for what works best in your geography, target market, organization, culture

Furthermore, and without disagreeing with all other contributions, I believe in providing a safe environment for the team to make mistakes. If you set clear boundaries for your team while also providing them with a safe space to learn, you have the best scenario for learning from past experiences and improving decision-making. Without these limits and security, the team will be constantly afraid of making mistakes, and those who don't learn cannot improve.

Everyone's approach to problem-solving is influenced by their actions. We deeply contemplate and use our knowledge to make informed decisions, often employing calculations to minimize effort. However, despite our best efforts, we are prone to making mistakes. While our experiments can propel us forward, these errors can hinder our progress. We must continue moving forward, regardless of trial and error. Through achieving success, we not only emerge victorious but also gain valuable experience to overcome future obstacles. Furthermore, collaborating with a team of experts will allow us to tap into the collective minds and insights of our colleagues, helping us surpass our individual limitations and reach greater heights.

If reversible decisions and /or low scale, always experiment to prove/disprove hypothesis and generate learnings and insights When irreversible decisions, and/or high scale, degree of experimentation has to be brought down

People need to google out stuff more, ask more questions and be more curious- as millenials and GenZ we have somewhere lost that curiosity of "Why" and "How"- as leaders we should be more approachable to people who want to learn more and ask more questions

It's important to remember that using decision-making frameworks might slow you down. That might be the best thing for some situations. But for early-stage startups, it's common to use something simpler that can allow them to experiment faster. A good rule of thumb is to at least run Amazon's famous "One-way & Two-way Door Decisions". Basically, you ask your team "Is this decision quickly and easily reversible?" If the answer is "yes", it's safe to just run the experiment and learn quickly.

Structured thinking is the most effective skill set to solve challenging problems and take tough decisions. Six thinking hats enables holistic view, empathy and more inclusive decision making seeing the bigger picture while taking known calculated risks if required

The most surprising aspect of decision-making is that most companies don't have a tool or process to give visibility to all decisions happening around the organisation. You have siloed decisions by departments, and there's no way to trace back the entire flow and thinking behind all major decisions. Part of the problem is that decisions are scattered across multiple channels. For example, a decision might start on a Slack thread, then be continued via email and completed on a video call. So one of the unsolved challenges is to capture and organise all these company decisions in one place. Tools like AsyncBrain are trying to solve exactly that.

Examples: A team developing a new product could review past product launches to identify factors that contributed to success or failure. The team could also interview customers and other stakeholders to get their feedback on past product launches. A sales team that is struggling to close deals could review past sales data to identify patterns in buying behavior. The team could also interview customers who have recently made a purchase to understand their decision-making process. A management team that is trying to improve customer satisfaction could review customer satisfaction surveys to identify areas where improvement is needed. The team could also interview customers to get their feedback on how company can improve their experience.