Critical Reflections: How Groups Can Learn From Success and Failure. Chris Ernst

doing the work itself, helping you simultaneously achieve organizational results and new learning and growth.

      First Things First

      Before you begin the Critical Reflections process with your group, you as the leader need to identify the key event, allocate time and space, and prepare to orient your group.

Identify the Key Event

      You may find that this first step takes care of itself. Something strikingly good—or bad—may happen within your group that clearly holds lessons for the future. Be alert to such opportunities. Whether the key event was a great success or a wretched failure, your goal will be to affect future outcomes in similar situations. Key events could include any of the following:

      • Crisis situation

      • Important meeting

      • Change in the group members

      • Change in the leadership of a group

      • Achieving an important milestone

      • Completing a change initiative

      • Hitting or missing a financial target

      • End of a quarter

      See the sidebar on the next page for a couple of examples.

       Key Events: Positive and Negative

      The senior management team of a regional hospital was working to create a more collaborative culture and to become a more customer-focused hospital. The hospital’s CEO, a classic type A manager, was trying to change in his relationship with his team to create more of an environment of shared leadership, shared ownership, shared accountability, and shared learning. Over a period of several quarters, the team made significant headway in trying to practice a more inclusive leadership model.

      In the midst of that process, the hospital found itself in a crisis situation, dealing with a massive overflow of patients from a large explosion at a local construction site. The hospital responded with high levels of professionalism: communication flowed quickly and openly, hospital units coordinated activities to allow for a quick response to emerging needs, and the staff displayed selfless dedication and commitment. The staff’s performance and positive patient-confidence reports following the explosion seemed to show that the hospital was on the right track.

      Then the team members were presented with data from the next quarterly survey and discovered that there had been a huge dip in patient confidence. They were stunned. One member asked, “Why haven’t we been able to create consistency in patient confidence?” Things fell apart, and the team members reverted to old behaviors. The CEO dominated the discussion, the directors of the various functional units pointed fingers at one another’s departments, and open communication collapsed.