Managing knowledge: how to implement a Lessons Learned Session

Every project offers us opportunities to learn. We can learn from mistakes, made by ourselves or others, from successful actions and innovative practices. Opportunities to acquire knowledge and learn lessons that can improve the quality of our work and our organization. Lessons Learned Sessions allow us to seize these opportunities by dedicating space, time, attention, and commitment to analyzing the project experience and identifying the lessons to be learned. 

What are Lessons Learned Sessions? 

We can define them as group sessions dedicated to identifying, analyzing, and sharing successes and failures within a project. The purpose is to draw those lessons from experience, to create and transfer knowledge that will allow us to improve future projects or phases of the project we are managing. Project managers, team members, executives, and other key stakeholders can attend the sessions: everyone can contribute to the discussion and enrich the group's knowledge base. 

Why should we carry out Lessons Learned Sessions?

Implementing Lessons Learned Sessions sessions brings four critical benefits to the team and organization:

• learning from mistakes and avoiding repeating twice mistakes we already made;
• collecting innovative approaches or best practices that emerged during the project;
• sharing and transferring knowledge among the different stakeholders;
• enhancing trust, involvement, and motivation, allowing everyone to share experiences, ideas, insights, and perspectives.

How many sessions should we implement? And when? 

The frequency and number of sessions may vary, according to the complexity of the project. A periodic implementation of the sessions, however, would allow us to prevent the possibility that, due to the past time, team members may forget lessons learned or leave the team, and therefore bring with them knowledge that could have created value within the organization, if shared. 

There may be opportunities to draw lessons from experience at each project stage. There are three fundamental moments to conduct a Lessons Learned Session: when we recognize a lesson to be learned; at the end of a project phase; at the end of the project. Including periodic sessions in our project schedule can prevent this precious time from being sacrificed for other activities, therefore avoiding implementing a single final session upon completing the project, when we will have removed important information for sure.

How to carry out a Lessons Learned Session? 

Of course, the first step is planning and communicating the meeting's date and goal: invite participants in advance, announcing that the purpose of the meeting is to collect their ideas, their experience, and their suggestions to contribute to the team and organization growth. We can organize a session at the organization's headquarters, in a more informal context or virtually: the important thing, if we want to obtain valuable results, is that each participant is enabled to feel free to express themselves without any repercussions. If for some reason, for example, we think that the participants may feel uncomfortable if we lead the meeting, we identify a facilitator, a super partes person, who will guide the group to achieve the goal that is also ours: to learn from mistakes and promote successes .

Once we gathered the participants, we are ready to start our session, supported by a flipchart or a virtual whiteboard

We could proceed by recalling the objectives and establishing some basic rules, such as:

• make the suggestions impersonal, do not mention names (if we believe that a stakeholder has been irritated by the constant Whatsapp messages of Marco, a member of our team, we will not name Marco in the meeting, but we will raise the need for a communication plan that differentiates register and channels according to the requirements of each stakeholder);
• it is not allowed to judge the opinion of others, nor to interrupt a colleague;
• focus on constructive contributions. 

Once the rules have been clarified, there are three key questions that we should, together, find answers to:

• What went wrong? What mistakes have we made? 
• What could we have done differently? 
• What went well? 

One question at a time, we ask everyone to contribute. Depending on the number of participants, we can proceed in several ways, such as, for example:

- asking each one individually, according to an order, granting the possibility to "pass" their turn, helpful in large groups, where the idea that a participant would have liked to share may have already been expressed by someone who preceded;

- making the participants intervene freely by raising their hands to encourage and stimulate the participation of those who have not contributed.

Meanwhile, during the discussion, we will record the information, writing keywords and concepts on the virtual flipchart/whiteboard, leaving out the names of the people who expressed them. When finished, we will end up with an extensive list of lessons learned, including mistakes, successes, and possible improvements. 

What do we do with it?

We could directly transfer all the lessons learned to a particular Register, collect those that emerged from the session in a report, communicate them to the project stakeholders, or filter the information to focus on the most important ones, inviting those present to vote the most important lessons. At the end of the project, all the lessons learned can be stored in an electronic database, filterable by keyword, to enrich the organization's wealth of knowledge and, potentially, improve future projects.