Career Talk – 5 Creative Ways to Conduct a Virtual Lessons Learned

Throughout much of our careers, we are often tasked with working alongside other colleagues to deliver a company goal or project. Sometimes things go as planned, and sometimes they do not. When projects do not go as planned, are these incidents a waste of time and money? Not necessarily! Throughout a project’s life cycle, we learn lessons and discover opportunities for improvement.

A key component to ensure the outcomes from these lessons are as effective as possible is to create an atmosphere that is engaging, encouraging all to be proactive, and follow-up to ensure your team applies their learnings. This article will provide five approaches to improve productivity, increase efficiency and create a culture of innovation and continuous improvement with your Lessons Learned exercises virtually. Regardless of your approach, each of the methods below should enable you to:

• Identify best practices and lessons learned that can be shared with other teams & colleagues
• Document & archive these lessons for future reference
• Disseminate lessons learned to appropriate & affected parties
• Create a list of actions to be taken based on lessons learned
• Follow up and monitor that the appropriate actions have taken place
• Common Factors or Obstacles to Consider

Knowledge can only be created in an environment where we’re open to the possibility that we’re wrong

The anatomy of each program/project team is different. Therefore, it is important to consider your approach based on the following factors/obstacles:

• Some team members are not vocal, or do not feel comfortable communicating in a group setting
• Some team members may be very dominant and speak over others
• The climate of the Program or Project may be tense, so objective approaches may be needed
• You may notice a lack of engagement & participation with some team members

1) Conduct a Survey or Poll

Why not conduct a survey to proactively gather feedback or use the polling feature in Zoom? There could be members within your team who are passive, or not willing to speak up in front of others. The utilization of a survey with all team members, managers, sponsors, customers & support staff will allow you to collect as much information as possible prior to the lessons learned meeting. This will also give your team the opportunity to think about their feedback without the influence of others in the room. Report your findings at the meeting and consider keeping the feedback anonymous to encourage others to speak their “truth”.

2) SWOT Analysis

If you would like for your team to engage in an interactive critical thinking exercise, why not consider a virtual SWOT analysis over Zoom? By conducting a SWOT analysis with your team as part of the lessons learned, this will help team members identify and understand key issues that affected the initiative, encourage the creation of mitigation plans, practices to protect, or identify threats to the organization. Have fun with this exercise! Have teammates write down their thoughts or gather this ahead of time, and take turns sharing the feedback and plotting to the correct SWOT quadrant virtually using a tool called Twiddla. Engaging your team in a SWOT analysis, will also create a forum for your leaders to review the perspective of team members, and drive strategic thinking.

3) Use IdeaBoardz for Virtual Sticky Notes & Votes

IdeaBoardz is a simple, easy to use virtual tool that allows team members to anonymously post on sticky notes. If you’re planning a lessons learned, I recommend creating three columns – 1 column named “What Worked Well”, another labeled “What Can Be Improved” and a 3rd for “Action Items”. Allow team members to enter their feedback for the first 2 columns and time box each section. Afterwards, allow team members to anonymously vote for each item. Pick your top 3-5 votes and create action items for these!

4) Start, Stop, Continue

One fun, yet practical exercise you can conduct with your team is the “Start”, “Stop”, and “Continue” method. Encourage feedback from your team by explaining the Start, Stop, Continue method as something they can use in their everyday lives. If they have weight-loss or fitness goals, one way to improve their everyday lives is to write down what they need to start doing, stop doing, and continue. The same applies to activities on the job. From experience, I found that starting off the conversation with “What are some things we need to stop doing? What is not working well today?” This is a great ice breaker to start conversation! It is also helpful to give your audience a practical example before starting this exercise. After gathering feedback for the “Stop” category, continue on by asking “What are some opportunities we need to improve on? Is there anything missing in the way we work that we need to start doing?“. For the “Continue” category, use this as an opportunity to celebrate any wins and motivate the team to continue doing these items well. All of these conversations can also be held over any virtual collaboration tool.

5) Try MURAL – Visual Collaboration!

A traditional way to capture feedback for your lessons learned exercise is to hand out sticky notes and have everyone write down their thoughts on:

• What went well?
• What did not go so well?
• How can we do more of what worked and less of what did not work?

However, if you have to conduct your lessons learned virtually, having the team write their feedback down on sticky notes could prove challenging. Therefore, I recommend leveraging the visual collaboration tool called “MURAL“. MURAL creates a digital workspace for your team, allowing them to plan, design and collaborate using virtual sticky notes on a whiteboard. Multiple users can work on the same whiteboard, and can see each other’s notes as they are “written” in real-time! Why not sign up for a free trial?

Please note: This method may be prohibitive if there are members on your team who are afraid
to participate in open dialogues with large groups, or if tension exists within the team.

I hope you found these techniques useful! Should you have any additional feedback, please let me know in the comments below!