The Art of the Debrief

When your work involves a number of steps to accomplish.

MountainGoat
Sep 2, 2018 · 4 min read

I would say for us humans this usually happens around when we are 3 to 4 years old —

‘You,’ ‘…who …’ Little Kidogo Stock Library 2016.

And that usually,

results will take us a number of actions before being achieved.

‘…Stare at Goats.’ Little Kidogo Stock Library 2016.

Some of us choose to go with more phases and others choose to go with less —

but, at the very least;

There are 3 phases:

  • Planning the work — Realising that you can achieve an outcome and want to achieve the outcome by some means.
  • Doing the work — This comes after we have identified what we want and we have chosen a formula to use to get the result.
  • Reviewing the work — we do this after the work, mostly to check whether we succeeded or did not and usually some sort of ceremony to mark the work as done (A yell 😱, a jump, a ☕, a 🚬, a review or a meeting for the more formal sorts).
‘Bored at lunch, or just too much wine?’ Little Kidogo Stock Library 2016.

There is a wealth of information on how to —

  1. Approach

and

2. Do

your work,

*In very efficient, and sometimes, frankly Amazing👀 ways!

‘Efficiency is always represented by shiny lights, here’s why we did it.’ Little Kidogo Stock Library 2017.

However,

in most teams that I have been a part of, the most common step that was confusing was the 3rd one!

Why?

Well, it’s simple really —

‘Everyone’s just wired differently.’ Little Kidogo Stock Library 2016.

Everyone just does it differently 👐.

Hmmm, that doesn’t really help you does it?

SOz…

We, of all people, know that sometimes it’s difficult to build context amidst difference.

However, at Little Kidogo, we believe difference is what we are made of, so we really really needed to find a solution from the Get-Go —

And thus we found it,

The Solution.

‘Delicate Significance.’ Little Kidogo Stock Library 2015.

And then, we tried the method in our team.

WHoop WHoop!

‘That’s me in the window.‘ Little Kidogo Stock Library 2017.

How to do it?

*If you have 13m10s watch the Talk 👆

  • Or just follow the summary of how we understand it in the steps below;

Here are the Steps to follow for a DeBrief:

After completing work —

“I file therefore I am.’ Little Kidogo Stock Library 2015.

1. Ask ‘What happened?’

— establish the facts of what took place.

Today Little Kidogo’s members in Nairobi had their first meeting.

2. Ask ‘What went right?’ (Happy Face :D)

The members managed to build context among themselves.

3. Ask What went wrong?

— again here we are reminded not to blame rather record what happened.

The rest of Little Kidogo was not able to be there.

“Remember, every person is a bubble of mistakes” — Zubair, 28 June 2018.

4. Ask ‘Why?’

— record the reasons for the event going wrong.

Little Kidogo has not found a consistent enough video streaming platform for the whole team to be able to have access to.

5. Ask ‘What can we learn from this?’

— record the lessons from this.

Little Kidogo must find a creative way of solving the issue of building context within the whole team in a way that is accessible to everyone.

‘Press to ring’. Little Kidogo Stock Library 2015.

And thus we found our next action step for the issue.

See how constructive this method is?

We dare you, do this as a review with your team,

just for a few sessions,

And let us know how it went for you in the comments below.

*P.S. Sure it’s gonna be awesome!


Little Kidogo Quick Bytes

Stuff we learn building the future we need

MountainGoat

Written by

Yoga Teacher, I like Adding Bugs To Code and Getting flicked off Motorcycles. Fork Me: http://github.com/zacck

Little Kidogo Quick Bytes

Stuff we learn building the future we need

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