The proverbial learning point

The proverbial learning point

Have you ever worked on a project where things just went horribly wrong, what is the one thing that will happen in these situations? More than certainly one person will utter something along the lines of ‘let’s take it as a learning point’. Sounds like exactly the thing you learn to say in a long history of corporate theater. But what does it actually mean? How do you take something as a learning point, who will learn?

Often projects are run through excel. Yes, we all know great project management apps but let’s face it even though it’s the 21st century projects still largely live (and die) in excel sheets and fancy schmancy powerpoint presentations made for nobody. How on earth do you learn in this landscape? There’s no way, you can add an excel column or a slide and call it key learning and then hope that whatever you learned will be engraved forever in your mind. This lack of learning possibilities is staggering and happens at a time when the rise of entrepreneurism has created a culture that embraces failing. Do you hear them whispering already ‘I’ve not failed I’ve just found 1.000 ways that won’t work´.

Learning, let’s face it is all the rage in a time where the world is evolving at such a speed that nobody can rest on their laurels. If that would be the case, we’d still wouldn’t have anyone surfing the ‘interwebs’. But how can we learn?

Forbes suggest a three step approach. Start by having clear goals, detail and measure results and check out the discrepancies between goals and results. Huffingtonpost suggests that we learn best by always looking for good in mistakes, move on and embrace them. And in case you are not yet convinced that mistakes can cause great things to happen, Inc Magazine has collected for you three brilliant companies that, how should we say, happened by accident.

One thing all suggestions about learning have in common is however, that yes we need to learn from mistakes and there are great conceptual ways of dealing with mistakes but none of the solutions offers tools where we can document the learning points. In order for project management apps to evolve they need to build learning as a core into their processes.

Check here, how Fingertip helps you to facilitate learning.