The Art of the Debrief
When your work involves a number of steps to accomplish.
I would say for us humans this usually happens around when we are 3 to 4 years old —


When we realise what language is,
And that usually,
results will take us a number of actions before being achieved.

At this point we start doing something that seems natural — we start dividing work into a number of phases.
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).

There is a wealth of information on how to —
- Approach
and
2. Do
your work,
*In very efficient, and sometimes, frankly Amazing👀 ways!

However,
in most teams that I have been a part of, the most common step that was confusing was the 3rd one!
…Wait, but,
Why?
Well, it’s simple really —

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.

< This TED TALK by Bill Crawford> Watch it. We did.
And then, we tried the method in our team.
And so far the results have been much better with this approach than with any other approaches we’ve tried!
WHoop WHoop!

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:
TL: DR
After completing work —

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.

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!
Now,
Back to Code 😝.
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