Lessons Log

A lessons log entry captures significant learning from projects, incidents, or experiences in a format that's useful to future teams who weren't there. Unlike retrospectives (which focus on team improvement), lessons logs focus on organizational knowledge that transcends individual teams.patterns, anti-patterns, and hard-won wisdom.

When to Use

• After completing a significant project or initiative
• Following a major incident, outage, or failure
• When you realize something important that others should know
• After discovering a pattern that keeps recurring
• When experienced team members leave (capture their knowledge)
• During post-mortems to preserve learnings

When NOT to Use

• You are facilitating the team ceremony itself -> use iterate-retrospective; this skill banks the durable entry that outlives it
• You are deciding whether to change direction based on results -> use iterate-pivot-decision
• The learning is an experiment readout -> use measure-experiment-results first, then bank the transferable lesson here
• You are updating stakeholders on what was learned -> use foundation-stakeholder-update