Post-Game Analysis in Business (The Art of the Autopsy)

You and your team proposed a project to a potential client. They shot it down. Everyone's feeling a little annoyed about it. So the last thing you want to do is relive that meeting play-by-play, right?  That is human nature. But if you have a tendency to tell everyone to just move on, not to worry and that you'll do better next time, you could be missing a huge opportunity.

In the sports world, coaches often make their teams watch footage of past games. They study what plays worked -- and which could work better with some tweaking. They figure out vulnerabilities. This post-game analysis is key to improving. It's expected as part of practice.

I have written before of how few people apply in work contexts, which is a shame, because application is one of the things that most successful individuals do at work, daily if they can. If one person is actively trying to get better at his/her job, and another is not, it's not hard to guess who will eventually do the job better.

One of the reasons people do not like to practice is that we do not like to dwell on our mistakes. That is understandable, and there are whole schools of thought claiming that managers should focus on people's strengths as a way to coax out better performance.

But even as you focus on people's strengths -- something post-game analysis can also reveal -- you can point out skills and habits that could become strengths with work. A brilliant but brusque person can learn to ask one or two personal questions – that is it, nothing crazy -- in order to appear human before meeting with other humans, and thus knock the ball out of the park more often. Someone prone to getting flustered can learn to pause and employ strategies for gaining time to think (like asking for clarification or someone else's opinion) before giving an answer.

You can also do post-game analysis after things that go right. Understanding why a meeting arrived at a great answer in a reasonable amount of time may help you stage more such meetings -- and that would be a beautiful thing.

Do you do post-game analysis in your line of work?  The importance of an autopsy after a defeat is to truly understand the reasons why.  As a medical examiner would determine the cause of death, you in turn shall explore the cause of defeat.

It is also extremely important to note that a defeat is only a temporary condition.  Also, it may prove that you had taken the very best effort to gain a contract and to go beyond logical financial necessity would have only lead to losses in profit and satisfying the existing customer base.