Used extensively in the armed forces, debriefing is now making inroads into the entrenched practices of leaders in a broad range of organisations. Debriefing is the art of reflecting on and drawing lessons from significant experiences. You can then apply these lessons into similar situations in the future, and by doing so improve your future performance. In fact, research[1. Ellis, S. & Davidi, I. (2005), ‘After Activity Reviews: Drawing Lessons From Successful & Failed Experiences’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 90, 5, 857-871] confirms that teams who invest time into debriefing show significant improvements in their performance over teams who did not.
“To keep doing the same things and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity”
Albert Einstein
What Experiences Are Worth Debriefing
To conduct a debrief takes time, and you must therefore be careful about selecting experiences that are really worth the time and effort. Generally speaking, you only debrief significant events that stand out from the norm. This might include the loss of a client, the end of a major project or the release of pertinent performance data. However, there are times when seemingly mundane events may be novel enough to warrant debriefing, such as the first few times you run with a new format for conducting your weekly staff meeting. Occasionally, the activity or event itself will not be unusual, but the ensuing level of success (or failure) will be, such as when the number-two tennis player in the world is knocked out of a tournament in the first round.
You must also decide how much time to devote to each debrief. The amount of time you allocate should be proportional to the significance of the event. This can be a long as several days and as short as a few minutes, but the large majority of debriefs last about an hour.
How To Go About Conducting A Debrief
The first choice you must make is whether to debrief the event purely through personal reflection or through a discussion amongst relevant stakeholders. In either case, it is imperative that you organise the session, which is why we have developed this three-part structure. Managers should use this technique whenever they experience a failure, setback or unexpected crisis.
- Recall what happened. Regardless of whether you consider the overall event to be a success or a failure, you need to identify those things that worked particularly well and those things that could be improved in the future. However, you need to stick to the facts rather than your interpretation of them. What happened? What did you (or someone else) do? What did you fail to do? How did you feel?
- Reflect on why things happened the way that they did. Focus on things that you control, such specific actions (or inactions) that can be repeated (for things that worked well) or changed (for things that didn’t work well), rather than wasting time on external conditions over which you have no control. However, you need to avoid ‘the blame game’ and the associated defensive routines it sparks in people. Try critiquing your own actions first and invite people to share their ideas of how you could do things better in the future. Be sure to model how to react with a never-ending commitment improvement rather than defensiveness. Then, allow people to share their reflections about their own and other people’s actions, but always insist that it be done respectfully. Furthermore, these reflections should also include a suggestion about what could be done differently next time. Finally, as the leader, you need to tease out and explore the quality and practicality of any suggestions people make, as some of them may actually be bad ideas.
- Connect your reflections into cohesive lessons for the future. Use the reflections you’ve gathered to build a cohesive lesson for the future (e.g., Five Keys to Keeping Clients). Such lessons are really simplified models that describe your current beliefs about how to do X well. Forcing yourself (and your team) to distill your reflections in this way will make it easier for you to apply that wisdom to similar situations in the future. You can also connect your reflections to your own (and other team member’s) prior knowledge by asking questions such as: How does this fit with your previous understanding of how to do X well?
