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Even the most successful of Businesses and Business Leaders will share their experiences of setbacks, mistakes and sometimes failures along their journeys. The common thread is their willingness to speak of ‘lessons learned’ that turned these stumbles into opportunities. Opportunities for growth, improvement and overcoming challenges.

Capturing lessons learned provides a valuable opportunity to reflect on past events and experiences and identify areas for improvement. This allows Business and Teams to gain insight and understanding into what worked well and what didn’t.  

Most importantly how and what can be done differently next time to avoid making the same mistake twice. 

3 Reasons Why Lessons Learned are Important 

1. Avoids Reinventing the Wheel – saves money! Reflect, evaluate and record lessons learned to guide the future. Essential to document the tools and techniques used to help you and others save time and money going forward. 

2. Don’t Make the Same Mistake Twice – it’s been said a million times before but still resonates.  To quote Albert Einstein ‘if we cannot remember our past mistakes and avoid them, we are simply going to make the same mistakes again.’  The key is to document the lessons learned, sharing and revisiting them to ensure the same mistakes are not repeated. 

3. Reflection – provides the opportunity to review both ‘failures and successes’.  It's important to relive success as a reminder of how to succeed and how to build on that.  Analyse what made the venture a success to take to future projects.

No matter what the Project, Business venture, or Political Campaign undertaking a Lessons Learned exercise is invaluable in understanding what went wrong, and critically how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. 

Reflecting on past experiences can drive improvement: 

This process includes Team, and individual self-assessment, Project review, and Business evaluation and reflection as a means for continuous improvement.  Importantly acknowledge what worked well, celebrate achievement.  Equally important is the need to examine why and how projects failed. 

Learning from Failures: Turning Setbacks into Opportunities for Growth: 

Unravelling the What, Why and How of a setback is crucial in creating an opportunity for improvement and growth.  Adopting a formal evaluation process sets the parameters for review and learning, avoiding name-blaming, mistakes repeated and time and money wasting. This learning is the essence of overcoming obstacles in Business.

The Benefits of Lessons Learned:

In addition, undertaking and sharing lessons learned promotes a culture of continuous improvement, allowing Leaders, individuals and Teams to learn from each other and work together to improve processes and outcomes.Increased collaboration enhances learning and increases confidence which fosters better decision-making.  Better decision-making reduces risk in future projects and Business ventures.

Takeaway: 

Adopting a Lessons Learned mentality is a step in building a successful Business, by developing Business agility, capability and resilience. 

Businesses prepared to reflect, review and evaluate ‘setbacks’ will move forward with learned experience.  Importantly, gaining insight to avoid making the same mistake twice.