Importance of Stating and Recognizing Learnings to Grow Faster

We learn from our work

Everyday, we are accomplishing tasks to make our business proceed. As the time passes by, we accumulate experiences on pursuing tasks and will become professional at it. And, this is done by accumulating experiences and figuring out more efficient ways to pursue tasks.

We call those key facts, points or ideas to do better as learnings or takeaways. Recently, I feel, in order to grow faster, stating those learnings and intentionally recognizing those learnings are important. In fact, we can literally see the growth by listing those in a file. Moreover, by stating the things we can improve for next time, and by doing so, we can continue pursuing the learning cycle and accelerate the growth.

How can we learn?

Let’s say we held a webinar. Once it is done, how do you review the result?

In many cases, people will just report only the facts. For example, the reports are like there were 30 people participating in the webinar. According to the survey, 27 people were satisfied with the content. And at the end, there is the impression statement such as I think the webinar was successful.

However, I believe, only stating facts does not tell us whether we have done well or not. Most of the time, when people hold a webinar, there should be some expectations. Those expectations can be the number of attendees or number of deals generated from the webinar. If there is an expectation, the result would be either better than expected, worse than expected or as expected. And no matter the result compared to the expectation, there will always be room for asking why.

If the result was better than expected, we can ask why there are more people who joined the webinar. And we can think deeper for the actions which have attracted more people. If the result was worse than expected, we might be able to ask which actions did not make people apply to the webinar as expected. Or we can ask, was the number of actions enough for gathering participants? Even if the result was as expected, we can think deeper to analyze why it came out as expected. Usually, we will pursue multiple promotions to gather participants for the webinar. In most of the cases, even though the result was as expected, some of the promotions went well and covered up the promotions which did not go as expected. As a result, it just summed up to be the number as expected.

Answers to those “why” questions will become learning. If the result was good, there might be a reason that we found the right group of people to approach. Or, we just found a good webinar topic which can gather a certain amount of people. And, these statements are the learnings. If the reason is that we found the right group of people, we can think “Are there any other similar groups of people?”. This thinking will lead to improvement for the next time.

Conclusion

Once we have done a project, it is always important to take time to review the result. I understand that once we finish the project, our feelings will become full of accomplishment and satisfaction of finishing the project. And easily forget to review. However, I believe the most important part about accomplishing the project is to review and list up the learnings.

Therefore, each time we finish some tasks or projects, it is important to list the learnings from the result and list the things which can be improved for the next time. By continuing these, we will become aware of learning and as learning piles up, we can recognize the growth.