Conscientious professionals always want to learn more, but the amount of useful knowledge that can be gleaned from revisiting the same ground over again diminishes after a certain point. Strong leaders know when to stop. It will be easier to move on if the analytical work of figuring out what happened and the follow-up work of changing whatever needs improvement are completed. Loose ends make it difficult to take on a new challenge. This is a good time to make sure that the housekeeping is done. Create any additional proposal copies required for the archives, consolidate and label files, close down Websites or collaborative work spaces and so forth. Clear out the war room, just as the crew starts striking the set the same night of a play’s last performance. Small symbolic actions reinforce closure and make it easier to turn to a new page.
Finally, senior managers should recognize the hard work and sacrifices of the team. Losing is rarely the result of intentional error or negligence, and recognition is all the more important when there are no bonus pools or other tangible rewards.
Each of the four steps described in this blog series is based on logic and common sense: determine what went wrong, and fix it. Why do so few organizations take these steps? It is because there are serious obstacles fighting against them. In effect, sales teams have to climb steep mountains to accomplish each one. We have time restraints, fear of exposing errors and we are adept at building workarounds to small failures. Most often, I find organizations focusing on the symptom rather than the disease.
Organizations engaged in a postmortem tend to focus on the symptom rather than the disease. If the proposal did not contain information relevant to the customer, it is easy to determine that the cause was an inexperienced proposal manager or proposal writer. In fact, the underlying reason might be that the sales team was never able to get good customer information to pass along to the proposal team.
This phenomenon of focusing on the symptom rather than the disease is compellingly examined by Amy Edmondson, who writes, “When only the superficial symptoms of complex problems are addressed, the underlying problem typically remains unsolved, and even can be exacerbated if the solution feeds into a vicious cycle (such as providing food as direct aid, which relieves the starvation but perpetuates the problem of population growth in inhospitable climates)” (Edmondson 1996).
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Step One – Find out what happened
Step Two – Determine Causality