Properly Conducting a Lessons Learned Meeting

Whenever we lose a client, we hold a lessons learned meeting between all of the people who were involved in the project. On episode 158 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in is Erik explains how we have improved our lessons learned process by properly holding lessons learned meetings. What we used to do, is during these meetings, we would sit together with our team members for about an hour and a half, and all take notes in our notepads about the situation that caused us to lose a client. After the meeting, one team member would write up these lessons learned in a Google Doc, in order to ensure we would always remember these lessons - and have a way for us to go back to look at them if need be. After this Google Doc was written up, Erik realized that this document was an incomplete list of what we had taken away from the situation. The person who took up the task of writing up the document, only mentioned the notes that they took during the meeting - creating a loss of certain lessons. We were missing a couple of aspects that other team members felt were important, and sometimes these lessons were even perceived differently by other members of the team. Even though we were having these meetings, we were not able to capture all of the lessons learned. Ironically, there is a lesson learned from this lessons learned meeting: how we should properly conduct these meetings in the future. Moving forward, instead of everyone writing their personal notes in their journal, we planned to open up a Google Doc on the conference room T.V., and type out these notes as we go. Instead of trying to reconstruct these lessons from incomplete memory, we were going to lay it all out right then and there. Although this may make the meeting a little bit longer, by the time the meeting is over, we will have a very accurate representation of all that was discussed and all the lessons learned. We always want to ensure we capture these lessons correctly, while also doing it all in one meeting. If you are going to have a meeting, then it should be the most efficient meeting possible. Get everything out in the open, write it all down, come to conclusions, and then once you walk out of the meeting - there is no need to talk about the meeting anymore! Do not waste your time on these meetings by not properly communicating or documenting them. It is all about communication, so make sure you are communicating properly! — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups. — Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is the also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.