Surfacing the Less Obvious Issues

At the conclusion of an activity there can be an assumption that the lessons will all be about the hard issues addressed during the activity. While this might be the case, the most important lessons might be around softer issues. The retrospect is an ideal tool to surface and allow full understanding of the lessons associated with the ‘hard’ technical or process side of the activity but it will also surface the hidden lessons. For example a retrospect on an engineering project surfaced lessons around the design and how it was implemented but also identified that their engineers weren’t being trained in softer issues such as vendor management.