Ponder Sheets

Ponder Sheets are a great tool for lifting your thinking up to the meta-level so that you can better see the patterns and opportunities in your most recent experiences.

They consist of three questions: What was that all about?  What was in it for me?  and What am I going to do about it?

At one level you might think that you already process such questions automatically, almost subconsciously. However doing it consciously and explicitly – laying out the questions, and writing down your answers – is far more effective in ensuring you benefit from the learning.

You can use it now, on the last thing you were involved in, or read, or watched. When I read papers, or watch talks, I make notes in Evernote. I then, at the top of the note, write and answer these three questions. And I always find in writing things down that: 1. I see things I would otherwise have missed;  2. I am more likely to remember what I thought; 3. I am more likely to make a deliberate choice about it.

So the green track is simply to try out these three questions on what you have read so far in this adventure, and see how it works for you.

Meeting reviews

Meetings get a bad press. Often deservedly so.

They seem to be the only business process that fails to learn anything. In fact, if you pick up a transcript from a meeting 2000 years ago, apart from the actual language used and the topic of discussion, most people would be hard pressed to see any difference between the process used in that meeting and the ones they attended prior to Covid.

Meeting reviews are one way for a team to ensure that their meetings do learn. They are a simple flipchart based tool (also available as a virtual flipchart and a whiteboard) which enables the meeting to capture: What went well (e.g. what will we keep going)?  What are the Areas for Improvement? And what will we do differently Next Time?

The Meeting Review can  then be revisited at the start of the next meeting to remind people of the learning, and provide a better chance of putting it into practice.

The blue track is to use a Meeting Review in your next meeting if you have not done so already.

After Action Reviews

The Meeting Review described above is essentially the last step in a longer four-step review used by the US Army to improve their effectiveness in the field.

The development of this process to help teams learn in fast changing relationship-based situations is increasingly relevant to the modern work place and the future of work. Change and disruption are becoming more prevalent, thinking on our feet under pressure is more necessary, and the need for continuous learning from all of that is more vital to our survival as an effective entity.

The After Action Review’s fourth question actually reads: What will we sustain? and What will we improve?  But it precedes this question with three other question intended to get a better context and understanding for those improvements:

1. What were our intended results?
2. What were our actual results?
3. What caused our results?
4. What will we sustain or improve?

The effect is to come up with even better learning rooted in more objective and systemic thinking.

So, for the red track, why not give it a go?