Effective Debriefing
Have you ever wondered “What is debriefing? Do we need to debrief? Why debrief?” The unequivocal answer, based on significant research on team and organizational performance, is (unsurprisingly) YES. Debriefing is the most important part of any team’s lifecycle. Put simply, great teams and great organizations are great at debriefing.
“One of the interesting things about teams is that we all have experience with the best teams that you were on weren’t necessarily the best teams on day one, and really teams become great by doing, by learning, by adapting and adjusting. And while a few teams do that naturally well and a few leaders do that naturally well, without some structure and some intentionality around it, very often it doesn’t happen. So simply having experience doesn’t guarantee learning and that really sets the stage for why teams need to debrief.”
– Scott Tannenbaum, PhD, author of Teams that Work and President of The Group for Organizational Effectiveness, Inc.
Watch “The Power of Debriefing: an Insight into Effective Teamwork” (Episode 41) of the No Way Out podcast featuring Dr. Scott Tannenbaum on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP7BsCKZpC4
Effective debriefing is the critical competency which sets high-performing teams and organizations apart. As the quote above makes clear, debriefing is not only about analyzing execution and consolidating learning. Debriefing is about improving future performance. Without an intentional, structured approach to performance improvement, any improvement (if it occurs) is a product of luck and chance, not intention.
An effective debrief begins with effective planning (see our Effective Planning Point Brief). During planning, teams should be identifying the critical elements, decisions, metrics, and risks which could affect them during the execution of work (whether that is software product development, factory or field operations, sports, or any environment which requires teamwork). This identification process not only guides where the team needs to focus its situational awareness during execution, but creates the foundation for review, analysis, and learning during the debrief.
The debrief itself is a comprehensive recreation and analysis of what was originally planned and intended, as well as what actually occurred through the process of work execution and task accomplishment. Differences between what was planned and what occurred are noted, and impacts and effects on outcomes are concluded through shared dialog and analysis.
Importantly, high-performing teams debrief not only the work and how it was accomplished, but also the way in which the team members worked together (potentially also with other teams). Evaluating the teaming skills of the team members themselves is a critical component of the debrief. Both of these components – the work and the teaming behaviors of team members – are analyzed to facilitate learning and insights, which are applied directly to future work execution by identifying improvements to the way tasks are identified, performed, and tracked, in addition to the way the team members work together (communicate, update status, make decisions, engage in backup behaviors, share information, assess risks and challenges, maintain healthy conflict, coach, etc.).
The inputs and components of an effective debrief are:
- The critical elements from planning, and the original plan. This is the original intent of the team, its understanding of the goal/objective and/or tasks required, the critical factors for success, and the important metrics / measures needed to inform effective work execution and signal success.
- What actually happened (effective recall). Leveraging the diverse perspectives of the team, the team members will need to recreate what actually occurred during work execution / task performance. Learning typically lies in the areas where actual work execution differed from how the work execution was planned, where surprises occurred, and where the team was most and least effective in task accomplishment and goal or objective achievement. Leveraging the observations and perspectives from the whole team helps mitigate cognitive bias and build a more objectively correct version of events.
Critical to include in the recall is not only the factual information (what tasks were completed when, for example), but what changed, what decisions were made, why those decisions were made, whether they resulted in the intended outcomes, what communication occurred, why it occurred, whether it helped or hindered team effectiveness and goal accomplishment / task completion, and all of the other additional teaming behaviors and traits the team members leveraged in working together. - The results. Where did the team end up? The team needs to agree on where they arrived, what they achieved, and to what degree they succeeded and/or failed. What tasks were completed? What goals or objectives were achieved? How well did the team do at accomplishing its mission or delivering on its goals / outcomes? Although the “results” section is often assumed to be the wrap-up, the real value comes in the analysis.
- Analysis and learning. The team needs to step through the results, the plan, their decisions, and understand where their decision-making and execution were more effective, and where they were less effective. Questions during analysis include:
- Why were the results what they were?
- Did different decisions contribute to or detract from team effectiveness and/or success? Why?
- What contributed to observed outcomes?
- What is within the team’s span of control?
Once the team has analyzed its performance, team members can consolidate learning and make decisions about what to change in the future. This may include how to make decisions or execute differently in similar situations based on what they have learned, or simply point to what they need to do next in order to continue working on developing a solution to a complex problem (based on what their research has revealed). Examples of questions during learning and transfer include:
- What will we do differently next time?
- Where was our decision-making good? Why?
- Where was our decision-making poor? Why?
- What can/should we do differently going forward?
- Are we still paying attention to the appropriate things?
- Do we need to run an experiment?
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Pitfalls and Debriefing Traps. As with planning, there are many common pitfalls in effective debriefing. Where possible, leveraging the same techniques used in planning (1-2-4-All, Think-Write-Share, etc.) can help ensure all voices are able to participate and all perspectives shared. A few of the most common pitfalls in debriefing are:
Failure to include and consider all perspectives in recreation and analysis (why Think-Write-Share and 1-2-4-All should be applied). Everyone has different perspectives on what, specifically, occurred during execution based on their point-of-view and position during execution. They may have different perspectives on what was communicated, why, etc., and how the team worked together, or didn’t. Ensuring all perspectives are represented and discussed (not necessarily agreed with) is critical to get less subjective and more objective.
Inaccurate recall and re-creation (the team recreates the idealized series of facts and events, not the actual). Improvements must be grounded in reality, and reality arises from accurate recall and re-creation. It is natural for team members to recall different aspects of execution (what happened) slightly (or very) differently. Having honest discussion and combining perspectives is the best way to improve the accuracy of team recall. Letting one or two individuals dictate “what happened” or warp events to fit their individual perspectives or agendas ensures that the debrief will fail to deliver meaningful learning or helpful inputs to future planning and execution.
Lack of conflict (team agrees with one version of events, fails to challenge perspectives, people afraid to speak up). Low-level conflict on a non-interpersonal level which is focused on accurate recall, re-creation, and analysis is vital to effective debriefing. Challenging perspectives, interpretations, decision points, outcomes, and analyses helps the team build a clearer picture of what actually happened, why it happened, and that leads directly to more effective changes in team functioning and planning.
Failure to identify learnings (the team correctly recalls and analyzes events but stops there). Clearly identifying where better decisions, mistakes, or errors could have been prevented by the team and transferring those lessons into concrete plans, steps, actions, protocols, or policies they will carry forward into their next planning and execution phase is where 99% of the value of the debrief is found. Some teams do the hard work of re-creating their prior planning and execution phase well, but then fail to capitalize on that work by using it to plan what they will change or do differently (based on what they’ve learned) going forward.
Focus solely on task work during the debrief. Recreating execution based on facts and events is important and is often the natural way to build the foundational framework for recall and analysis. However, failing to integrate aspects of teamwork (not only task work) into the debrief means the often higher-value improvements to performance – improving how the team works – are missed. How communication occurred, what decisions were made and why, who contributed (or didn’t) in those decisions, what reprioritization and backup behaviors occurred (or were needed but did not occur), and many other teamwork factors need to be considered along with the important task accomplishment factors which are typically the focus. Debriefing how people worked is typically more difficult than what they worked on, but the greater value is often in the more difficult conversations. As the team gets better at debriefing, these conversations will become more natural and easier.
Failing to incorporate learning into future planning and execution. The team runs a coherent and successful debrief with meaningful learning and changes identified at the end of it. However, as they move into planning, they fail to account for things learned, agreed, or identified during the debrief. The team does not identify areas for improvement or changes to either how or what work is done (task accomplishment or team working). Thus the team is not able to improve performance, reduce errors, or realize any value from the debrief. The debriefing takeaways must be “taken away” and into planning to improve future execution.
Ignoring small improvements in search of big, life-changing ones. This is perhaps one of the most common problems in debriefing. Almost everyone wants to improve and perform better. In service of doing so, teams often look for significant, impactful, “life-changing” improvements of epic size. However, this causes the team to ignore or miss entirely the smaller improvements, the “tweaks,” which do impact performance but in smaller ways. In reality, the life-changing improvements are infrequent, and the day-to-day work of making small, incremental improvements (which compound) are both far more accessible and, ultimately, far more impactful. Of course, when the opportunity for a large improvement is there, the team should leverage it, but they shouldn’t search for it when it may not exist and when smaller improvements abound. A 1% performance increase every week results in a roughly 66% performance increase (not 52%) over the course of a year. Small changes matter.