It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. — Eugene Ionesco.

Since 2017, I’ve used the Debriefing technique to analyze situations and extract lessons, both professionally and personally. These situations can range from “Why was I late to this important meeting?” to “Why couldn’t we support visionOS in the Xcode project?” to “Why is my son late to school again?”

This is a simple yet very powerful technique that can be applied both individually and in a group. It is somewhat similar to Retrospective in Agile/Scrum development and an Incident Postmortem. The first time I learned about Debriefing was from Olexandr Lyadov. I applied it, and it stuck with me since.

It’s important to remember that in a team setting, the goal of Debriefing (as well as in Retrospective in Scrum) is not to point fingers, but to figure out root causes of a situation, extract lessons, and avoid bad outcomes or repeat good ones in the future.

I don’t remember where I got my debriefing questions, but they have worked well for me over the years, and I hope they will be useful for you, too. Here’s my template for a Debriefing:

1. What were we trying to accomplish?
2. Where did we hit/miss our objectives?
3. What caused our results?
4. What do we should start/stop/continue doing?
   1. Start
   2. Stop
   3. Continue

# What were we trying to accomplish?
# Where did we hit/miss our objectives?
# What caused our results?
# What do we should start/stop/continue doing?
## Start
## Stop
## Continue

Let me go over all of them in detail.

What were we trying to accomplish?

This is a very important step. Oftentimes, it reveals that my goal was vague or unclear to me — I knew what I wanted to do in general, but I didn’t consider all aspects. Other times, it shows that the goal was implicit: everyone kind of knew it, but no one actually defined and set it explicitly.

Where did we hit/miss our objectives?

You’re starting to dig a bit deeper. Sometimes, it’s clear how to measure if the goal was accomplished or not. Oftentimes, it’s more nuanced, and you need to break down the goal (or goals) from the first step to better understand them.

For example, the goal was to “Deliver the project on time”. When you start unpacking this goal, you can see it from multiple angles. Where did we hit/miss our objectives?

• We didn’t deliver the project on time, we implemented all the tasks, but we were fixing bugs after the deadline.
• Our delays weren’t communicated to stakeholders early enough.

What causes our results?

You’re going to get to the root cause of all contributing factors. This is where the 5 Whys technique is very useful.

• We implemented tasks on time, but we had bugs. Why? We started testing one day before the deadline. Why? Multiple factors:
  • The amount of work was higher than we anticipated. Why? We didn’t consider ABC, and only XYZ, and that added one week of development time.
  • The Quality Assurance Team was delayed on another project and started testing the project one day before deadline. Why?…

You got the idea… You do this for every point from the previous step, and go as deep as you need to get to the root of it. Sometimes it’s 5 “whys”, sometimes it’s only 1 “why”, and sometimes you will need to have multiple forks of questioning to understand every contributing factor.

Sample debriefing

All characters might be fictional.

What were we trying to accomplish?

Get my son to school on time.

Where did we hit/miss our objectives?

I dropped our son off at school 30 minutes late.

What causes our results?

• We woke up late. Why? All of us went to bed late. Why? We had basketball practice and needed to buy groceries. Why? Because we ran out of food and didn’t buy over the weekend. Why? We didn’t plan it, and something else popped up.
• The breakfast took too long to cook in the morning. Why? Because I decided to cook a fancy breakfast instead of simple scrambled eggs. Why? I felt like it.

What do we need to start/stop/continue doing?

Start

• Better plan shopping list and buy groceries over the weekend
• Preparing food in advance to warm it up for breakfast

Stop

• Cooking fancy breakfast when in rush

Continue

• N/A

Instead of Conclusion

Looking back at using the Debriefing technique for 9 years, I realized it taught me two things:

• Set clear goals (I’ll write about my planning process soon).
• Separate goals from causes, and turn insights into actionable lessons.

This helps go from “Oh no, this XYZ happened. Again…” to “I want to avoid ABC, so next time I need to do XYZ”. Now, you’re in control.

Here you go. Simple, yet very powerful technique. Don’t sweat it, though; there’s no right or wrong way to do it. If you extract value from it, this means it’s working.