The team was wondering about its effectiveness. They could see how much they had worked over the last months, but they couldn’t see much beyond this. They knew that they wanted to learn from their mistakes and grow the business, but they didn’t see themselves looking much at projects retrospectively. They were struggling to understand why.
For some reason, our conversation also involved talking about the military. This allowed us to use the simple metaphor of the briefing and debriefing to look into their question.
The military uses four forms of briefings: information brief, decision brief, staff briefing, and mission brief. All of them are designed to clearly, concisely, and expediently present information. The decision brief, for example, will present the commander with information allowing him to make a decision. Whereas the staff briefing will aim at securing a unified effort and rapidly disseminating information.
In a team, the staff briefing would do the same. It would allow those in charge of a project to provide everyone else with the information needed that will help the team execute on whatever united effort is asked for.
It takes the vision of a project forward by helping the team see what the project is for and how they can execute on it to achieve that unified effort. It is brief and thus will omit to describe every single step or how individuals shall do them. It gives the necessary information allowing the team to know what to do when they are in the heat of the action.
The debrief on the other hand is there to gather useful information, interrogate an individual, or review a process upon completion. In a research setting the debrief could be there to disclose the purpose of an experiment or provide psychological support.
What the debrief does, is close the loop on a given experience. One that was started with a brief. It is there to assess how the information provided during the briefing helped the team or individual achieve their task. That is to receive all the information that person went out to gather. May it be as a result of their task or through the assessment of how the experience went.
In the case of the team, I was working with, there was no loop to be closed. They acted as seemed best in a given situation, but they had no briefing allowing them to know how being in the heat of the action was aligned with the brief. They lacked the connection between their objective and the chosen strategy. They basically found themselves with nothing to debrief upon. They could only try to figure out what problems they had encountered, but they couldn’t evaluate, for example, if these were problems or normal challenges that belonged to the experience. They also lacked the information making the debrief interesting for them by allowing them to see how satisfied they could be with the work they had done, or how it was bringing them closer to their objectives.
