More on Debriefing
BY SIVASAILAM THIAGARAJAN, PHD (THIAGI)
While experience may be the best teacher, raw experience alone does not automatically guarantee that people learn from it. People learn from experience only when they reflect on it, gain valuable insights, and share these insights with each other. Debriefing is the process of facilitating participants to help them reflect on their experience, gain valuable insights, and share them with each other.
When To Use Debriefing
Learning moments. Organizational life is replete with important milestones such as completing a project, passing an inspection, acquiring a new client, and making a hefty project. All of these milestone reflect the culmination of processes experienced by different people. These milestones provide appropriate opportunities for debriefing participants to capture the lessons learned during the experience.
Feeling the pain. Organizational life is also full of painful tragedies such as accidents, downsizing, mergers, lose of clients, and discontinuation of product lines. Appropriate debriefing techniques can help people to process the impact of these events, discover useful principles, and move on to future activities.
Abstract and complex. Debriefing also helps people to revisit large-scale events (both real-world and simulated ones), analyze the elements, derive cause-effect relationships, and decide the best course of future action.
Emotional involvement. People feeling intense emotions -- whether positive or negative -- find it difficult to focus on logical patterns and root causes. In highly emotional situations, most people make mindless assumptions and acquire superstitious behavior patterns. Used appropriately, debriefing can support experiential learning by adding a rational component.
Slowing down. In today's complex and dynamic workplace, critical events occur so rapidly that their significance is lost on the people affected by it. Debriefing enables us to take the time to reflect on what happened during these sudden events and to learn how to be better cope with future events of a similar nature.
What Are Some Cautions To Be Observed?
Take your time. It is important to set aside ample time for the debriefing discussion. Don't make the mistake of ignoring the time required for debriefing while scheduling an experiential activity.
Know your limits. Remember that you are not licensed to practice therapy. In situations that involve intense emotional trauma, seek the help of trained professionals instead of adding to the problem through inappropriate intervention.
What Are Different Types of Debriefing?
Type of experience. Two major categories of debriefing relate to the nature of the experience that. Reality debriefing involves real-world experiences in the workplace. Simulated debriefing involves experiential learning activities such as training games, role-plays, and corporate adventure exercises.
Group size. Each of the above two categories can be subdivided according to the number of people involved in the debriefing process: Large group debriefing involves a discussion with hundreds of participants. This type of debriefing usually begins with subgroup discussions whose outputs are later analyzed by the entire group. Small group debriefing involves 3 to 10 participants who have shared the same experience (for example, completing a project) from different perspectives. Individual debriefing involves a single participant who has undergone a significant experience (for example, surviving an act of workplace violence).
Type of facilitator. We can also classify debriefing sessions depending on who facilitates the discussion. Typically, an external facilitator coordinates the debriefing discussion. In a different type of debriefing, a team may manage its own debriefing without depending on external facilitation. Sometimes, individuals may be debriefed through a questionnaire that is administered either in a paper-and-pencil mode or online mode.
What Are Some Tips for Designing Debriefing?
Use a model. You can increase the effectiveness of a debriefing session by preparing a set of appropriate questions to probe different elements of the experience. In general, these questions should reflect the following topics for reflection: How do you feel? What happened? What did you learn? How does this relate to other aspects of your work life? What if the situation were different? and What should you do differently in the future?
Analyze the experience. The most effective way to prepare debriefing questions is to analyze the original experience into its components including events and decision points, objects involved in the process, feelings and emotions aroused by the process, people involved in the process, principles associated with the process, and scenarios related to situational variables. You can use lists of these components to generate comprehensive sets of questions related to each of the topics suggested earlier.
Integrate debriefing with other activities. For best results, incorporate debriefing discussions with team meetings. You can also include debriefing as the final step in all technical and interpersonal processes.
Do it regularly. Conduct a debriefing discussion at weekly or monthly intervals--even when no significant event has occurred. This type of periodical debriefing enables you to obtain information about multiple perspectives and helps participants develop fluency with the technique.
What Are Some Tips for Conducting Debriefing?
Train facilitators. Successful debriefing programs in your organization depend on the availability of trained people who can facilitate these discussions. Begin your debriefing initiative by training a group of facilitators. Do not limit yourself to members of the training department. Include a variety of managers and team leaders in your group of facilitators.
Encourage flexibility. The real secret of converting managers into facilitators is to encourage a mindset that enables them to be simultaneously structured and flexible. While it is important for the facilitators to have an organized set of debriefing questions, it is equally important to encourage spontaneous comments from the participants. The general approach should be one of *encouraging a freewheeling dialogue and falling back to the prepared structure when the conversation meanders in meaningless directions.
Publish the results. Encourage people to reflect on their experiences by giving them samples of other people's reflections. Summarize insights and action plans from each debriefing session and make this summary available to a large audience through print and electronic channels. Solicit feedback and inputs from readers to continuously increase and improve the results of reflection.
Preserve confidentiality. Effectiveness of debriefing sessions depend heavily on the participants speaking the truth, even when it is painful. Nothing dampens the authenticity of a debriefing session as the fear of being the only person to point out that the Emperor is naked or the need to speak in politically-correct conundrums. Protect the privacy of participants who make potentially controversial statements by publishing the results without individual attribution.