Ideally you should regularly reflect on your experiences and the lessons you have learned. But if you do not have a process for this, our calendar provides one in the form of the New Year.
In business, waiting for the New Year (or your annual holiday) may be sufficient to "recharge your batteries" but your learning and improvement cycle needs to be much shorter: you need to learn from each project or encounter with a customer.
There are different techniques for this including:
- The ADRI model used in the Australian Business Excellence Framework: It evaluates how key criteria are achieved by "exploring how the organisation puts its plans and structures into place; deploys those plans and structures; measures and analyses the outcomes; and learns from its experience. These are known as the “Assessment Dimensions” of Approach, Deployment, Results and Improvement (ADRI)."
- Action learning: Action learning can be defined as a process in which a group of people come together more or less regularly to help each other to learn from their experience.
- After Action Review , developed by the US Army. It essentially asks four questions: What did we expect to happen? What actually happened? Why was there a difference? How could we do it better next time?
The common element in these techniques is that you have to look back and learn before you can improve in the future.
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