HOW TO LEARN FROM MISTAKES AND RETROSPECTIVES IN ENGINEERING
Why Is Retrospective Difficult and How to Learn From the Past
It’s not about telling stories about why and how it happened in hindsight.
“Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original.” — Frank Herbert
Engineering requires regular diagnostics, retrospectives, postmortems, root cause analysis, etc. We want to reflect on the past and learn something from it.
But often this doesn’t work. Some teams identify causes and still struggle with the same issues. Some people “never learn”. It seems like we don’t always learn even from the best descriptions and analysis of past events.
Many times I have seen fantastic root cause analysis, and as soon as the next day, the people reverted to the usual, almost instinctive behaviour. Everything was identified, but nothing changed.
Why is this so?
We don’t like ambiguity, so we make stories with “logical” conclusions. It gives a sense of safety…
