Thinking about the Debrief
Every year the convention has a debrief for staff after the convention in which we attempt to talk about what has happened in the organizational year and find out the lessons learned. I don’t know if I could possibly have resisted posting about it before. It’s pure candy for those of us who are totally fascinated with how the wheels work behind the scenes.
I say “attempt” because while we do collect a large amount of valuable information, it’s a very formal meeting without a lot of give and take. Sort of “debrief theater” rather than the real work of figuring out how to change. (There are reasons not to do that work in a group of 100 people, for one thing the meeting has to end before midnight, but I do wonder if there are other ways to make that meeting actually productive.)
But that’s not what I want to write about today. I have been in the part of the project where I’m severely self-critical of everything that is going askew in the planning, and as there are too many details for any one person to possibly know about and there are lots of people trying to work together with incomplete information and not enough time, well… things go awry. Askew. In error. Pear-shaped. Less than optimally. Dead wrong, even. All the time. Every day. And so I am thinking, often, of the retrospective prime directive as found in the Agile programming community:
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
As useful as these words are in guiding my interactions with others, it’s grace to be able to believe that they apply to me as well.