Almost every company my team interacts with starts the conversation with a story about how they failed in the past, many of them multiple times on technology projects. The story goes something like this, we chose a technology, we wrote a big check to the vendor, and we hired the technology company to implement. It stalled, it failed, and it lost traction. We got bitter. We fired the technology partner. We started over and did the same thing again or we simply don’t do those projects anymore because we’re not willing to take the risk. This is a global phenomenon. I presented last week in China and Japan and after each talk several printers came up and said “we’ve done that multiple times.”

We engage with people who often have what I call very recent technology wounds, not completely healed and very easy to re-open and re-infect. Why do people keep repeating the same mistakes over and over? I think the number one reason for repeating mistakes is the fact that we never have open and honest post-mortems after projects fail. Because you have the option to blame the technology and the technology provider, that’s the safest road to take. Blame the vendor, fire them, rinse and repeat. Rarely does anyone inside the company take the time to look at their role in the failure. I’m not saying technology companies aren’t part of the issue, I’m saying that everyone plays their part in the failure. You have much more control over your resources and your approach to projects than the vendor – focus on what you can control in order to set yourself up for success. Failure is expensive; make sure you cash in all the learning possible from it.

Before you embark on the next episode of “rinse and repeat,” call for a serious post-mortem on the last project that failed. This is not a listing of everything the vendor did; they are gone, who cares? Get in a room and get everyone to walk through what went right and what went wrong. This is harder than you think and nearly impossible in certain company cultures. Here’s a brilliant presentation about how to use the Five Why’s methodology in post-mortems. Without an honest and thorough post mortem on why projects have failed in the past, you’ll be destined to keep repeating them.