Criticism

In KM we’re very keen on lessons learned. Sadly, in normal life we often hear of things that have gone wrong with the economy, politics and public services, for instance, where there is a fixed-jaw proclamation that lessons will be learned, and we all know that, most likely, that’s the last we’ll ever hear of it until the same thing happens again.*

What I also find doesn’t help in these situations is the rush to personalise the failure and severely blame those seen as accountable, and to proclaim everything is “unfit for purpose”. Clever people, I have observed in lessons learned situations, find it easy to generate a long list of shortcomings held to be the causes of failure in a project. Their education has taught them the highly-prized skills of analysis and criticism.

I think there are two main cases here. One is the case of someone really and truly doing wrong. The other is more complex, and I think more usual, and it’s the conspiracy of circumstances. Sometimes the wrong person ends up doing the wrong job in the wrong way, without the tools or resources or knowledge needed, and things go wrong. Think of the counter case: how common is it that a person or team has precisely all the time, resources, inputs, approvals, knowledge and experience that they need to do the best job? I just don’t think that is the normal situation in life, although failures are usually evaluated as though it was. It’s a fantasy, I think. Mostly a heap of risks were taken on (whether consciously or not) because there was no alternative, or because that was the situation that the long path of history had led us all to. There was no chance to be as wise at the start about everything that needed to be made 100% correct as there seems to be at the end, in retrospect.

So I think in lessons learned it would be good not to assume that the yardstick for everything is 100% perfection, nor that individuals or even organisations are always completely to blame for everything the went wrong. It was in the context. And that was layers upon layers of context. This doesn’t mean not learning the lessons – by which I mean actually implementing improvements, not just taking note of them, but it does mean taking due account of circumstances before we’re too critical.

^{* Just a hint of an example of the sort of thing I’m discouraging, I fear … it’s very easy to slip into …}