by Cheryl Lambert
Many organizations are not as open with communication as they’d like to be, or as they ought to be. This manifests itself in several ways. One is when there’s a problem, and invariably there are, people are hesitant to talk about it. And if they do speak about it, it’s not across divisions, but kept within a silo of one’s own division.
There may be folklore that “messengers are shot” for bringing bad news to the bosses. Even if this is untrue, an organization without an open dialogue about problems and their resolutions is missing an enormous opportunity for improving itself over time. Just consider that if incidents, large and small, are openly discussed, how much learning can occur.
I worked at a global financial institution for many years and when things went wrong, those in positions of responsibility would request a postmortem. That term irritated me so I went searching for a word that would be better than an autopsy and would help to create a more open culture. I didn’t have to look too far as the armed forces routinely conducts “After Action Reviews” and with AAR as its acronym, it didn’t sound half as scary as a postmortem.
After adopting the AAR into my every day language, I added it as a regular topic during weekly staff meetings, asking at least one team member to preside over an AAR. Initially, these debriefing presentations were less than robust and there wasn’t a great deal of enthusiasm for them. But as the weeks progressed and AARs remained on every meeting agenda, people began to share more details about their divisions’ incidents.
The benefits were numerous. Our culture became more open. Information was shared across departments. And people began learning from one another in an organic and natural manner. We even made sure that our AARs didn’t always highlight just SNAFUs — some celebrated what went right, and I learned that this too needs to be repeated as frequently as possible.
As employees became more comfortable talking about incidents, it spread across the organization at every level. This was beautiful. Read about any major SNAFU in history and you’ll quickly start counting the number of errors that go undetected until there’s a calamity. But in a culture where sharing and learning from incidents is expected, accepted and valued, even the smallest problem can more easily be detected before it morphs into a disaster.