Debrief to Stay on Track and Drive Continuous Improvement

Debriefing to stay on track, learn from experience, and drive continuous improvement

Debriefing is one of the most powerful leadership practices—extremely useful for project management, performance management, and coaching.

Debriefing is most effective when used as part of a well rounded “action cycle,” e.g., PADA: Plan, Act, Debrief, Adjust (this is a rewrite of “plan, do, check, act” from Quality Control). PADA applies the powerful logic and process of performance management to all major work goals and business initiatives.

For every important or complex project or action, use this holistic and sustainable action cycle to ensure execution is successful, efforts continue until the project is completed, and your team members are learning from their experiences.

My Pitch:

Use PADA to work more scientifically: If you don’t stop from time to time to ask: “Did it work?”, “Were we right?”, and “Was that the best way to do it?” then you are operating on hunches, intuition, luck, and habit rather than facts, evidence, analysis, and you are probably not learning much from your efforts or getting real experience on the job. “Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you” (Aldous Huxley).

Debriefing helps you keep your employees on track (achieve goals) and also helps you (the leader) adjust your leadership style as needed: Am I giving my employees the Direction and Support they need on this project?

Key Objectives & Benefits of Debriefing:

1. Keep important issues on the table (focus; top of mind; sustainability)

2. Enhance accountability for action and results

3. Assess & monitor progress to plan, and fine tune efforts to stay on track

4. Identify and celebrate successes in a timely manner

5.  Generate self-correcting behaviour and continuous improvement

6. Enhance learning through critical reflection; build employee skills & employability

7.  Foster a culture of learning, coaching, and scientific / rigorous / validated behaviour

8. Assess team talent (skills, expertise), opportunities for development, re-deployment

9. Work on your facilitation skills, build team collaboration skills, and improve teamwork

Which of these benefits (outcomes) are most important to you in your work? You cannot focus on all of these outcomes at the same time in any one meeting. But if you know what you want, you have a much better chance of getting it. That is, if you know which is most important for a particular debriefing session, you can focus on that desired outcome, and facilitate the meeting to achieve your primary objective.

Great news: If you do a good job of achieving any one of the great outcomes, you will probably benefit from many of the other ones anyway. Doing a good job of debriefing generates many great outcomes simultaneously—and certainly over time.

Simplest, generic debriefing format:

1.    Are we on track; did we hit our targets? Why / why not?

2.    What worked best? And why?

3.    What did not work as well; what challenges did we face? And why?

4.    What did we learn and how can we improve moving forward?

These very simple debriefing questions, when well facilitated, can help you do something far more important than writing report cards for your employees and projects. Regular debriefing can help you analyze why things turned out the way they did, learn from experience, and drive continuous improvement.

Metrics for Debriefing:

How do I know if my debriefing sessions are working; if I am effective; if they are generating concrete results for my team?

Your primary metrics for debriefing should be case specific, i.e., deduced directly from the purpose of your debriefing session (how and why you are using debriefing): What is my primary purpose for this debriefing meeting (e.g., any one of the classic Benefits of debriefing listed above), and did it work (did I get what I wanted)? Since we usually debrief to keep projects on time & budget, the key metric for debriefing meetings is often: Is our debriefing meeting helping us stay on track and keep this project on time & budget?

Here are a variety of possible metrics for debriefings. Which of these might help you get more out of our debriefing sessions?

1.    The debriefing meeting was time well spent (for you and your team)

2.    The project is on time and on budget

3.    Alignment: we all on the same page in terms of goals, roles, plans, challenges…

4.    Employees are in the loop on project, its progress, and their roles in it

5.    We are dealing with issues as they arise; catching problems sooner; no negative surprises

6.    We helped someone solve a problem, improve their plan, or utilize available resources 

7.    People remember lessons learned for current projects from past debriefings

·       Project Management: You have a better understanding of progress to plan on important goals and projects; learning from past successes and failures; driving continuous improvement

·       Performance Management: You have a good/current understanding of how your employees are performing; their challenges and successes; where they need help; where they need development; when they are ready for bigger challenges…

·       Learning: Better understanding of why things turned out the way they did; people learning from mistakes and successes; not making the same mistake twice; generating new ideas; general / continuous improvement; improving systems thinking; improving teamwork & collaboration

·       Employee Development: Over time, your employees are making better decisions, asking better questions, doing better project discovery, ready to take on more responsibility...

·       Employee Engagement: Your employees are actively engaged in the conversation; asking well informed questions; offering good input/ideas; attentive to the needs of the team or organization; volunteering information, chipping in; solving problems together…

·       Leadership Style & Coaching Support: Your employees are getting the support and direction they need to master their tasks and prepare for more responsibility; you are forced to intervene less often (i.e., jump in to solve your employees’ problems); fewer negative surprises…

Conclusion:

Again, these very simple debriefing questions, when well facilitated, can help you do something far more important than writing report cards for your employees and projects. Regular debriefing can help you analyze why things turned out the way they did, learn from experience, and drive continuous improvement.