This is a fellow onion.
Look how sad she is.

We’d just finished, or rather abandoned, a project, so decided to do a lessons learned exercise.

These are specific lessons we learnt during the work and what we wrote on our flip charts….

1: A meeting room of people agreeing something is like a class room agreeing. Nobodies learnt, they’ve just nodded that they’ve agreed not to disagree.

2:  Policies don’t work. Nobody knows they exist, and if they do, they don’t know what’s in them, and if they do, they rightly don’t care.

3: Regular official meetings are worse than ineffective, they suck life from your bones, if you want to communicate with someone don’t “have a meeting”, just meet someone.

4: Use a hand drawn picture, it’s better than a description of something that could exist as it actually does. You can point at it and talk about something concrete rather than guess the contents of each others heads.

We actually learnt that. So why the glum face?
We thought that this, and other lessons would be useful for colleagues.
We tried to get others involved, told them what we’d learnt. Nobody was interested, or even agreed.
We soon realised it is pointless as it was us who had learned, so telling someone else is pointless. That is the actual lesson learned, only you can learn a lesson. Anyone else is just told it.

Lesson learned.