Learning Lessons

With any activity like running events or meetings where there is a clearly defined objective, it is really important to do a review at the end of the day. Many people use “happy” sheets as a form of evaluation to get feedback on the day from the participants, but these have limited value. People either don’t fill them in, or they give you a very biased view whilst they are still so close to the event itself. Also, the quality of catering and venue for the event will often dominate their feelings at the end of the day. For this reason, it is often much better to get views from people a few days later by email. The comments by this point will be much more objective.

However, the review at the end of the day by the team which organised the event is really key. For a number of years I have been running a process based on ‘After Action Review‘ which is a technique developed and used by the US Army.

I have simplified the process so that it becomes just 3 simple questions:

• What worked well
• What didn’t work so well
• What have we learnt

This gives a structure to the feedback that enables the team to identify the key learning points from the event. Of course, the other key point then is to make sure that the points made are captured and that they are built into future approaches.