What do you do if your team and stakeholders are not learning from failures in Business Architecture?

Failures in business architecture are often misinterpreted as failures in IT. Projects and programs are started to replace IT systems, while often the problem is not necessarily in the IT system, but that the business process facilitated by that system no longer works for the organization, or never did. It's important to recognize and acknowledge this, in order to bring effective improvements. That begins with relevant KPIs that strongly correlate with the mission, vision, strategy and the way value is measured for the organization itself as well as its clients. Only then can you properly monitor the end-to-end value chain and determine where the bottlenecks are, learn from it, and improve the process.

Simply put: Learning from failure is critical to improving things moving forward. Finding time to reflect on the current state of a situation / implementation / process is critical as it means you have to be introspective and search for the truth. This is the first step to identifying improvements. It's important during these reflections that you are honest with yourself and I've found self awareness to be a critical skill.

Em primeiro lugar é importante entender que aprender de forma contínua é umas das coisas importantes que a humanidade deve fazer. E errar, fracassar faz parte da jornada da vida em qualquer aspecto, afinal não somos perfeitos. Então, a grande virada de chave é sempre entender o que aprendi, irei aprender e irei gerar valor no fim do dia. O fracasso não deve nos penalizar e paralizar e sim, aceitar e evoluir aprendendo.

Relevant KPIs, that really measure value creation across the end-to-end value chain will help with the measurement part. Root cause analysis and risk management help categorize those challenges. Furthermore it's crucial that value creation is measured across the end-to-end value chain, not in silos. Optimizing one part or phase of a process could just as well have a negative effect on the overall outcome, as it could have a positive one, because it negatively impacts the interfacing with previous or subsequent phases. A rolling average approach approach could work here for larger and more complicated processes, that can't be optimized e2e in one go. Let's say you have 8 phases, you first optimize value for phases 1-3, then 2-4, 3-5, etc.

It's also important to recognize failure impact in scope of BA, therefore a failure should be also mapped or connected to related BA component. To get more clear vision of why it's a failure, a clear difference between desired state and a real state(failure) should be described.

Once something has been categorized as a failure and acknowledged as such, and the root cause has been investigated, then it's time to come up with strategies to take away the cause and fix the damage that has been done already, or to at least mitigate both. Once the root cause has been identified, it can also be beneficial to take a wider view and see if there are similar risks or issues, or slight variations (also for other processes and systems) that should also be incorporated in the fixing strategy. Statistics also play an important role here: not every risk manifests itself and not every mitigation or fix works, but in large numbers, across the entire organization, that effect should average out. The strategy should account for that

Acredito que podemos focar na melhoria contínua de forma a pensar, medir e entender de forma estratégica se a falha deva sr resolvido ou não e agir com o famoso Kaizen, PDCA (Planejar, fazer, checar e agir) e principalmente aprender.

The classic example I've seen here is a "fuck-up" night where people come to share their failures and more importantly what they learned from them. It's important to note though that the agile value of responding to change is critical to moving forward from these failures. It is probably not constructive to share failure and learnings if they cannot be incorporated by others who are present. In my opinion this is why enterprise companies often struggle as their release cycles are often too long.

A melhor forma de aprender é ensinar e compartilhar, então com confiança, vulnerabilidade e coragem devemos compartilhar as falhas com o propósito de ajudar e aprender.

Here it's important to all be responsible adults and professionals, acknowledge the facts. We shouldn't play the blame game, but at the same time there is nothing wrong to point out where the cause lies and which team was responsible for that. Not to point out who's fault it is, but to take lessons from it. Of course that also means there should not be any retaliation, mistakes happen, and often it's not even that, just that something was overlooked, not considered, or underestimated. Lessons should be taken from that: what was the cause, what was the chance of manifestation, should we update our risk management strategy, are we facing similar risks elsewhere in the organization, how can we fix/mitigate those, etc.

Learning from mistakes is a vital part of personal and professional development. Mistakes are inevitable, but it is how we respond to them that truly matters. Each mistake presents an opportunity to reflect, analyze, and grow. By acknowledging our mistakes, taking responsibility, and seeking to understand what caused them, we can gain valuable insights and make better choices in the future. Embracing a growth mindset and viewing mistakes as stepping stones to success can lead to continuous improvement and the achievement of our goals. So, let us embrace our mistakes, learn from them, and use them to fuel our personal and professional growth.

Pensando de forma holística, com o foco do cliente, da outra pessoa, querendo melhor todos os dias, pois em tudo podemos aprender.

Openness, being non-judgemental about the reasons for failure and self awareness are all critical skills to learning from failure. In my experience the companies that have quick release times and incorporate feedback in their process are also in the best place act on the learnings. Enterprise Organisations often struggle.

Entendo isso como um cultura de inovação, para isso é conseguir abertura com a liderança, confiança e honestidade para buscar o crescimento, sendo as pessoas o principal pilar.