Insight

The Lesson Nobody Can Afford to Record

Organizations rarely fail to learn because people are incurious. They fail on a much narrower problem: the honest version of the lesson costs someone something, and there is no way to say it that doesn’t.

If the accurate conclusion is that a decision made by a named person, in a meeting everyone remembers, was wrong — and the organization has no way of recording that which doesn’t damage them — then it will not be recorded. What gets written instead is communication could have been better, or we should align earlier next time. Sentences that have never once changed a decision anywhere, and that everyone in the room recognizes as the polite form of nothing.

This is where psychological safety stops being a pleasant idea about how people should feel and becomes an operating requirement with an invoice attached. Not comfort. The specific, narrow ability to say what happened without paying for having said it.

An organization that cannot do that will hold retrospectives forever and learn from none of them. Worse, it will believe it has a learning culture, because the meetings are in the calendar and the documents exist.

There is a cheap defence, and it works because it moves the judgement off the person. Write down, at the time and before the outcome is known, what would have to be true for the decision to be right. Then the later conversation is not an assessment of somebody’s judgement. It is a comparison against something they wrote themselves, which almost anyone can survive.

An open loop is not slow learning. It is the same mistake, purchased twice, at full price, some distance away, where nobody connects the two.