After Action Reviews: An Essential Method to Accelerate Your Team’s Improvement

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I think avoidance is the enemy of great. Avoidance – particular avoidance of discomfort – is even the enemy of good. It’s the enemy of the growth and change that lead to flourishing.1

In all organizations, mistakes are guaranteed to occur. What’s not guaranteed to occur is learning from these mistakes. The one positive that comes out of failure - the ability to reflect and correct mistakes, ends up neglected by the organization. Avoidance of intellectual discomfort is usually the preferred route.

There are several reasons organizations avoid learning from mistakes:

· Organizational ego prevents honest discussions about what went wrong

· Busyness means that people immediately move onto the next project

· A rush to judgment centers on superficial issues, rather than deep-seated problems

· Blame is quickly directed at external factors, absolving any need to discuss internal responsibility

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High Resiliency Organizations – What Investment Firms Should Learn from High-Risk Industries

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There’s a small group of organizations that have learned to excel despite operating in extremely complex, dangerous, and unpredictable environments. For example nuclear power plants and aircraft carriers all operate in rapidly changing environments with deadly consequences for failure. They’ve learned to handle the unpredictable surprises that would decimate a typical organization. The fact that many of these organizations operate for years without failures is a testament to the deliberate design of their organization and carefully constructed team training.

Investment organizations should pay attention. Investing occurs in volatile and unpredictable environments. The future is unknowable and full of surprises. The most well-researched plans will be disrupted. For many institutional investors, the consequences for getting it wrong are measured in the billions.

Many investment firms are comforted by their highly educated and credentialed personnel, extensive technology/software resources, and a deep roster of consultants. While these components are certainly essential, they’re missing one major component.

Resiliency.

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Lessons from the Warrior Monk: Jim Mattis

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James Mattis is one of the most respected and revered military leaders of the last 50 years. Mattis served for over 40 years in the Marine Corp. Mattis in nicknamed the “Warrior Monk,” due to his incredible study of leadership and military history.1 It is reported that he has a personal library of 7,000 volumes on war and strategy.2 Mattis recently published his book, Call Sign Chaos, which details his leadership lessons learned from his military experience.

Leaders across all industries will improve their ability to lead by studying Mattis. Below are eight of the most important lessons Call Sign Chaos:

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Managing Human Error in the Investment Process

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All investors make mistakes. Mistakes happen not only because of misjudgment but the nature of investing. Mistakes arise from universal conditions within the investment world.1 In other words, it’s usually not the person that’s the source of the mistakes, it’s the environmental and situational factors. It’s the system.

Rarely do we acknowledge and understand the system. We neglect environmental factors and reflexively attribute mistakes to personal factors: laziness, inattentiveness, ignorance, etc.

Investors operate in a complex world with imperfect information and an unpredictable future. Add in additional pressure from clients and organizations and investors are primed to err.

How leaders handle human error separates the great investment teams from the average. Better assessment and understanding of errors build a competitive advantage.

Yes, investors make mistakes. But they’re not made in isolation. It’s the system issues that exacerbate personal mistakes. The big idea is resolving “system” issues that will lessen the effect of unavoidable personal shortcomings.

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Learning From Mistakes: 5 Lessons from NASA's Challenger Disaster

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Big mistakes may grab the headlines, but it’s the path leading up to the big mistakes that intrigues me. Seemingly inconsequential mistakes, compounded over time, are the foundation for disasters.

Common wisdom says we should learn from our mistakes. Easy to say, tougher to implement. There’s a tendency to look for a smoking gun – find the people that screwed up and fire them. Or find the one piece of technology that failed and replace it. If only it was that easy.

Problems are rarely traced to a single cause. Organizations often fall into the trap of seeking a convenient scapegoat because it’s easy and convenient, not because it reveals the truth. There are several conflicting factors that complicate learning from mistakes:

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