So, how did you guys do it?

One of the teams I’m coaching is working on ISO accreditation. When they started this project, only one Office was interested. Now that they’re ready for an external auditor, other Offices are suddenly taking notice.

It had not been an easy project. The team hit dead-ends, detours, speed bumps and various obstructions along the way. Telling one person about about their journey takes some time and energy. Telling several persons the same story again and again is stressful.

Luckily, the Team kept a Timeline. It’s one of the Development Entrepreneurship tools I learned from Jaime Faustino and Chrys Pablo. Basically a list of the more significant events in the life of a project, a Timeline is added to every time one of those events happen. It includes the date and description of the event, the Project Team’s role in it, and links to related documents, graphics, websites.

From a Monitoring, Learning, and Evaluation perspective, a Timeline is perfect for reflection and discussion. It lets the team review their wrong assumptions, and the (sometimes painful) way that they learned their mistake. It also shows what the Team got right. Thus the Timeline is a good source of ideas about what needs to be done differently the next time the Team takes on a project.

The idea of documenting one’s journey, and reflecting on it, is older than Homer writing the Illiad. Plato is accredited with saying “The unexamined life is not worth living”. St Ignatius de Loyola encouraged Jesuits to do the Examen twice a day.

So keep notes as you start and proceed with your reform. If you want to, you can maintain a personal Journal. Or you can also have a Timeline that everyone on your team can view and contribute to (Google Docs is an option). To get the best out of it, reflect on what you’ve written, discern what you’ve learned so you can be more effective with your next project, innovation, or reform.