Debriefing As A Strategic Tool
Debriefing is an English word but made popular in military lexicon. How would a military 'term' become a strategic tool in a corporate environment? There are different types of debriefing in the military. However, we would restrict ourselves to the one called after-action debriefing. This type of debriefing is a tool used by the military to reconstruct events after a war exercise, war or any unpleasant or horrid event.
Debriefing As A Strategic Tool
The essence of such debriefing is to learn from the mistakes made, highlight the positives and brainstorm on ways to checkmate future occurrence of the mistakes made. Looking at it this way, debriefing would make sense for the military that is involved in life and death situations.
Voice Recorders For Lectures
On the other hand, organisations may not be involved in a physical life and death struggle, but there are a lot of repercussions with decisions made within organisations. So, it would make it expedient for organisations to look at ways to lessen mistakes by pro-actively using debriefing as a strategic tool.
In a way, it brings to mind oral history which involves passing of experiences and events by word of mouth from generation to generation. Oral history was the way of preserving historical facts and data before events were documented properly. It also served as a learning experience for posterity. The downside of oral history was that it can be inaccurate and would require serious verification most times. However, this downside would not affect debriefing as it is a modern form of oral history. Events can be accurately documented with voice recorder, video recording and writing.
In every organisation, there are always projects going on. Involved in these projects are a lot of people but usually there are no tools or instruments to capture knowledge or their learning experience. This really dreadful circumstance is made worse by the fact that most people do not willingly share knowledge or information. So, what you have is a lot of people with useful information in their heads using it piecemeal just to gain recognition or promotion. Some even hoard information for the rather bizarre reason that the organisation would not lay them off in a downturn because of what they think they know.
What you find is that companies are losing out in getting that information in people's heads. Thus, people leave the organisation by exit, resignation or death and take all they know with them. It's strange that most companies do not see the wealth of experience people are taking away with them. It's a knowledge goldmine! Unquantifiable!
There has to be a conscious effort to harness or capture knowledge in people's heads. It comes in the form of debriefing! As stated before, it is a mechanism that has been used successfully by the United States military for ages and it still has relevance for us today and more significantly the corporate world.
Debriefing has many uses and advantages for the corporate world. We would look at some of the uses one after the other. A word of caution though, this form of debriefing should not be seen as a 'fault finding mission'. The main focus is to have a learning experience.
It could serve as a feedback mechanism. As a feedback mechanism, all the team members (within one month of the end of the project) in a project group would be called for a debriefing meeting. There has to be a structured format to the meeting so that time is not wasted and for optimum results. However, it doesn't have to be too formal. I would personally go for the semi-formal meetings because people are more relaxed and would open up to talk about the negative and positive parts of the project; successes, failures, good, bad and the way forward etc. It should also be noted that people would also speak up more if there are no top management staff present at the meeting. Top management can read the extracts after the meeting. The most important bit is that the meeting is a success.
It could be used for knowledge capture. Knowledge capture has been a subject for long discussions. It also brought about the new role job role of Chief Knowledge Officer. Companies are now trying to find numerous modes and methods to capture knowledge. Usually, most people hoard information for whatever reason. Debriefing would be a good way to access some of these information which can be labeled as 'intellectual company property'.
For adequate knowledge capture during the debriefing, there has to be a professional secretary who would take down all the pertinent points discussed. It might even involve recording the session so that important points are not missed out. Once these information are 'captured' they can be put on the company's online portal where people can access the information if need be.
It could be a form of knowledge sharing. Once the information is put online for everyone to access, that is knowledge sharing. This means that people would have access to the information in the future if there's a similar project they are about to start. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, project members would have a reference point. They would be able to avoid the mistakes and leverage on the successes from the previous projects.
It is a good technique for learning experience. Learning is a continuous process. As such, the debriefing session is a good learning experience for everyone. Furthermore, learning would be on a larger scale as a lot more people would have access to the information when it is online. In addition, the 'captured' knowledge can serve as case studies. In this case, some of the debriefing sessions can be made into case studies for class discussions during trainings.
It could also be a marker for good practice/expanding knowledge base. When the technique used for the initial project has been used successfully for some other projects, it could be termed to be good practice. That is, the technique could be documented as a business process manual or a standard operating procedure for the organisation. In a way, the organisation is expanding its knowledge base.
Please note that debriefing should take place as soon as a project is finished so that events are still fresh in people's heads. There would be a facilitator who would not have been part of the project. This is vital as the facilitator should be an impartial observer. The facilitator should be skilled and matured enough to tread carefully in keeping the debriefing going without it getting heated or out of hand. As stated before, it should be stated clearly that it is not a 'blame game' session. Different organisations would use whatever meeting format works for them. So, every organisation can do it as it sees fit. Questionnaires can be used too as part of the oral session. Let's briefly look at the typical or sample questions that may be used for a debriefing session. This list is not exhaustive by any means.
Objectives of the project (were the objectives met?)
Responsibilities / roles (was there synergy?)
Relationships - internal / external relationships / customers (was there cooperation?)
What went well?
What were the positives?
What went wrong? Why?
What were the negatives?
How do we mitigate against the negatives next time?
What could have been done better?
What did we learn?
What is the way forward?
It would be absurd if organisations do not take up debriefing as a strategic tool because it has a lot of benefits and it does not involve a lot of resources to launch. The center of attention is the learning that would be taking place in the organisation. Blaming people for mistakes made on the project should be strongly de-emphasised. The emphasis should be on learning from the mistakes made while celebrating the successes of the project. Debriefing would generate a wealth of experience that can be archived and used as need be. It would save the organisation the cost of making the same mistakes over and over again. As well as save time on projects as there is a reference point to start from. Overall, the advantages are too numerous to overlook and company's would definitely be better for it.
Debriefing As A Strategic Tool
