Couple of posts back I talked about dealing with mistakes. Important stuff. One way of learning is to be asking the right set of questions. When I was researching this topic, I found a useful list of questions you can ask yourself to learn more about what went wrong. Here they are:

• What was the probable sequence of events?
• Were there multiple small mistakes that led to a larger one?
• Were there any erroneous assumptions made?
• Did we have the right goals? Were we trying to solve the right problem?
• Would it have been possible to have recognized bad assumptions earlier?
• Was there information we know now that would have been useful then?
• What would we do differently if we were to be in this exact situation again?
• How can we avoid getting into situations like this? (What was the kind of situation we wanted to be in?)
• Was this simply unavoidable given all of the circumstances? A failure isn’t a mistake if you were attempting the impossible.
• Has enough time passed for us to know if this is a mistake or not?

Just taking 30 minutes to write down your answers to these questions will give you valuable insight in the situation and what you should change the next time.