Purpose: Doing a Lessons Learned workshop is about creating a sharing environment where people discuss the positives and the negatives in the team's processes and reflect on how the processes going forward can be better.

This can be done both when starting a project, while it is ongoing, or simply to evaluate as a team, the experiences and processes of the way you make products or provide service. 

Here's how you do it!

Let's take a specific scenario as an example.
You are a team leader of a customer service department. The process of resolving service inquiries for a particular problem for the past couple of months has been resulting in customers being unsatisfied with the lack of information they get. 

You decide to do a Lessons Learned workshop with your team to see what you can learn from this problem and find solutions on how to improve it.

Give this workshop about 45 minutes to an hour depending on the size of the group.

1. Before the workshop, map out all of the steps of the process. Put each process on a poster. 
   For example, 1 post-it has customer contacts through phone or email. The next post-it says the evaluation of the problem by the employee and so on until the process is complete.
2. Begin the session by introducing the map to your team. Ask them if there are any steps missing. Add the relevant categories. 
3. Go through the categories and ask about their insights. You should facilitate the conversation by asking these questions
   1. What is the positive?
   2. What is the negative?
   3. What can be improved?
4. Make sure you document the discussion and allow people to share their experiences of this process and their ideas to improve it. 
5. Aim the conversation to a collaborative solution, and understand what the problem with the process is and which steps you as a team is going to take to improve it. 
6. Make sure you summarize the discussion at the end of the workshop and send out the information in your communication channels to your team, so everyone is on the same page.