Every few years I’ll do a job or a project for a governmental organization. Given that I spend about 90% of my time dealing with private sector organizations, I always have to recalibrate when I enter a public sector organization. Most often in government, I experience generally hard-working people frustrated by a bureaucracy resulting in precious little actually being accomplished.
The public sector usually attracts people who are generally risk averse, and as a result, the idea of taking action without perfect information, or allowing oneself to make mistakes and then swiftly correcting them is a hard sell. I seem to spend a ridiculous amount of time just urging people to hurry up and move to action.
In some cases, my problem in private sector organizations is exactly the opposite. Getting people to slow down for just an hour or two to evaluate and document their performance is often branded as heresy. In the case of doing some form of “look-back” after a project or initiative, public sector organizations tend to do a much better job.
There are probably a variety of reasons for this, not the least of which is that public spending is subject to much closer scrutiny, and by a wider variety of interest groups. Nevertheless, private sector organizations would be well advised to take a look at how their cousins in the public sector evaluate and document lessons learned from projects and initiatives.
Most often, the reason given for failing to do a post mortem is, “we don’t have time, besides… everything went well.” When things go very well on a project or initiative is the most important time to do a post mortem. Do you know why things went better than expected? Can you repeat that performance again, or was it just good luck?
To spend an hour or two properly debriefing a project or initiative may be the best investment an organization can make.