土曜日, 4月 16, 2005
Postmortem
Conducting a postmortem could be really emotionally exhausting especially if you're chairing this activity. Time and time again, I remind proj members to "not take it personally, it's not them but the process that was done". Probably it's human nature to associate oneself with one's output and thus the "process = person" connotation.
How can you arrive at an objective evaluation? In the corporate world lots have been said and done, good and bad decisions happen everyday but how can one contribute to improve himself and his team? I am beginning to understand that there's no hard and fast rule. We are all human beings, we have feelings and we are never the same. Everything really boils down to impression. A personal impression of how we interpret an event based on our experiences, values, feelings and association or disassociation for that matter. It's hard to make people understand that postmortems are not their PRP but rather a venue to reflect on what happened...
Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I find myself having a difficult time conducting this task with JP counterparts. This is not an audit report, I emphasized but there's a particular member who feels uncomfortable about it. She said she was just dictated by her manager to do what she did, to write what was written and to implement what was implemented, and now everything is pointed down to her. Somehow I pity her but as chair of this event, I cannot console her, I have to remain distant, objective (or at least try to be). And when I talked about it with Ate, she said, how can she say that now when all she heard from this girl before was "this is a great project", "everything is really great". If she didn't believe or she didn't want to do it, why did she abide? It's her fault, she cannot blame her boss for this.
It had me thinking there. Yes, she was probably a victim because of her vulnerability. But Ate has a point, we are ultimately responsible for the words that come out of our mouth, for the actions we do, for the things that happen to us. Our convictions led us to where we are. We owe everything to ourselves and that's a fact.
This postmortem is fast becoming an opening, a bridge to the journey of change...and I bet it's not going to be easy. As I said, there's no fast and hard rule. But, being the head of this activity, I should stay focused and firm and objective...and human enough to realize that it's probably gonna take more time ~ but we'll get there somehow.
# posted by Unknown : 9:42 午後
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