If your team is involved in providing services or product to “clients” and you want to learn to continuously improve and to delight those clients, I highly recommend the book, Radical Management by Stephen Denning. This book applies equally well to small teams, micro-business, not-for-profit, and larger corporate entities. It offers a repeatable and scalable approach.

Denning has put into one package a number of the project / program management techniques I use in my consulting practice. He discusses seven basic principles:

• Focus work on delighting the “client”
• Do work through self-organizing teams
• Do work in “client”-driven iterations
• Deliver value to “clients” in each iteration
• Be totally open about impediments to improvement
• Create a context for continuous self-improvement by the team
• Communicate interactively: stories, questions, conversations

And then does a good job of describing the practices under each one and showing how they relate to many different contexts, both commercial and not-for-profit (i.e., it is not just for business J)

He does a great job combining stories, theory, and specific practices.

I put this on my bookshelf right next to Michael Gerber’s E-Myth Revisited (also highly recommended).

Learning to delight more.

“If HP only knew what HP knows.” This is a classic line from knowledge management proponents everywhere. Why doesn’t this work as smoothly as we’d like?

Jack Vinson, who writes one of my favourite blogs, Knowledge Jolt, wrote a posting about his friend and local knowledge management networking colleague, Kate Pugh, who published the new book, Sharing Hidden Know-How. The central thesis of the book is that most modes of “knowledge sharing” in organizations are broken and that the Knowledge Jam should be able to remedy the issues that Kate sees. These issues are that there are knowledge blind spots, knowledge mismatches, and knowledge jails. The blind spots are places where one part of the organization has knowledge that could help another, but no one knows that the other exists. Mismatches are places where a successful connection might have been made, but then the conversion into the new context is not made or not made at the appropriate time. And finally, jails are knowledge stores that are created (documents, repositories) but which no one bothers to use or reference because they make no sense out of context.

The Knowledge Jam idea addresses these three problems with three specific elements: facilitation, conversation and translation. Facilitation helps overcome the blind spots by explicitly getting people talking to one another about specific topics for specific business needs. Conversation helps align the contexts of the people who are trying to learn from one another. And translation is the act of taking the conversation and making explicit plans for using what was learned: don’t simply write up minutes of the discussion, but take what you have developed and commit to putting it to use. It’s hard to say that any one of these are more important, but from my perspective the focus on explicit translation and re-use of the knowledge has been missing from many knowledge sharing initiatives.

Take a read.

[UPDATED] What is the maximum size for an After Action Review? 

For instance, a nonprofit I know has had to evacuate their staff from a country. This is part of the reality of working in volatile situations. When they do this, they want to learn lessons in case they have to this again. They often do a full review that takes several weeks, lots of interviews, and a written report. Or consider Preemptive Love Coalition. When they take children to Istanbul for heart surgery, the trip itself can take a week or two with lots going on before, during, and after. Many, many lessons they could learn for the next time they do a surgical trip, which might be several months in the future.   

I would not use an AAR in these situations. 

Is that surprising? Here is what I mean. 

[UPDATE: I realized I need to say a little more to answer the "size" question]

Size is not the most important consideration

The inital question was about the maximum size for an AAR. The size of the group is not the most important consideration. For an AAR, I am more concerned with focus and time and the right people. 

• The focus of an AAR is fairly local. It is based on the recent experience of the team. It is oriented on helping the team learn from that experience and then updating their process or approach for the next time they – or someone like them – has to do the same sort of thing.  
• The time duration of an AAR is fairly short. The AAR meeting should run between 15 and 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, people begin to feel that it is an intrusion into their ability to get their work done. And when that happens, they become reluctant to do it again. It is much more important to do AARs regularly than to do them “completely.” When they become regular, the team develops the habits to improve continually.
• The right people are the ones who experienced the event and are invested in improving. For an AAR, you want to ensure you are getting the perspective of everyone who experienced the event. You may not need every person, but you probably want most of them and at least a representative from each set of people.

The size of the group is the number that can cover these objectives and get the conversation done within the timeframe. Practically, the larger the group, the more focused and creative the facilitator has to be.I have done AARs with groups as small as 4 and as large as 20. With more than 20 people, it is hard to get the meeting done in 30 minutes.  Instead, I might see if I could just have representatives from sets of people or I might see if we could break the event into smaller chunks. Or, more likely, I might turn it into a longer form “Retrospect Meeting” (as described below) to give us more time. It all depends on the depth of analysis we need to do and the likelihood we are to do the event again soon.

Seeing AAR’s place

Let’s take a step back and see where AAR fits with other tools for team-based reflecting. (more…)

My colleague, Phil, had a great insight in response to my last blog post, What to do with lessons learned. I was talking about visibility boards:

The best motivation to keep on doing retrospections is when the team sees that it is producing tangible results, that their work is becoming more effective or efficient. I want to be sure that the team or the community that cares about the change or improvement sees the progress being made.  

A visibility board is an easy and important tool to help everyone see the progress being made and to be reminded. It is a physical board that shows everyone – team members, management, leadership, and facilitator – the status of implementing improvements or removing impediments that are getting in the way of doing work. 

The visiblity board should be displayed in a public place: in the team’s work area or in front of the manager’s office or in a team’s virutal workspace if they have a common system they use. Not only does this help everyone remember to implement solutions but it also helps other people see the ideas that are being generated.

Phil’s point is that when you commit to you a change, you need to follow up to see how it is working.

Based on his experience as a process improvement coach, he says that 

… the outcome from [a process improvement event, such as an AAR or retrospection] needs to be tracked as a formal organization “story” to validate that the improvement suggestions were implemented and how successful they were (or not). We had 30, 60, or 90 day follow-ups. Someone (or group in our case) has to lead this. If we take the time to come up with improvements or suggest new ways of doing things, we want to be disciplined about implementing and taking action on the improvements to validate that our intentional goals for taking action are being met and if they are not, understanding why and come up a new action item (or kaizen).

Retrospection only works through disciplined practice both by teams and by leadership.

The After Action Review (AAR) is a tool to help a team learn from their experiences in order to gain immediate, concrete improvements in performance. An “action” is any major or routine activity or event that a team of people undertakes, especially those events that they or other similar teams will likely repeat in the future. AARs are easy to do. That is what is deceptive: Teams and organisations only see the benefit when they do them repeatedly, when it becomes a habit.

Download our free AAR for Teams brochure (in English or in Spanish). (more…)