Project Management for Trainers: Stop "Winging It" and Get Control of Your Training Projects

Using Systems Thinking to Review a Project

For projects that were either very important, very problematic, or just very different, teams should spend a little more time capturing the lessons learned using a Learning Organization technique called systems thinking. Systems thinking is a group technique that creates a visual model which depicts, through cause-and-effect loops, the different events that influenced the success of a project. (See Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline [New York: Doubleday, 1994] for more information on systems thinking and Learning Organization techniques.)

Figure 6.2 shows a simple example of a model that answers the question “Why did this project struggle?”

Figure 6.2. An example of a simple systems thinking model ...