Here's another quote from the Harvard Business Review article about Pixar. Last week I wrote about the difference between communicating and deciding. Today it's an interesting quote about postmortems. I am a big fan of doing postmortem reviews of projects, mostly because I am a huge fan of learning. Organizations are simply not intentional enough about learning, and that is a big reason why many fail to live up to their potential in my opinion. We often feel we are too busy to take time to review a project after it's done, and that is a mistake. But postmortems aren't so easy, as the quote illustrates:
It reminds me of an important lesson: learning is not aways pleasant. Come to think of it, a lot of important things are not ALWAYS pleasant, like leadership, growth, change, success, winning, doing the right thing, being a good parent, etc. What is our obsession with unpleasantness that we would actually game well-designed systems to help us learn and grow?
Jim Stroup did a nice post last week about developing individual leaders. I wonder if we need to be screening for the ability to confront unpleasantness?