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Snakes. Let's just say I'm not a fan. I wouldn't lose any sleep if a species of snake fell off the face of the earth. Nope, it wouldn't bother me at all.
However, if there was a species of snake that experts thought fell off the face of the earth and then showed up again...well, now, that would be interesting.
And so it was...
In 1936 American naturalist William Beebe was on Clarion, a Mexican island about 400 miles off the mother country's coast. There he discovered what he dubbed the Clarion nightsnake. I've seen pictures...just looks like any ol' snake to me, but apparently this one had never been seen before.
Beebe returned to civilization with one preserved in a glass jar. But then Beebe died. No one ever saw a Clarion nightsnake again. The one in the jar was eventually assumed to be a labeling error and, just like that, the snake was banished from the records of existence... written off for almost eighty years.
And then...
Recently, Daniel Mulcahy, a researcher for the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, got curious. He thought the nightsnake might still exist.
(By the way, "nightsnake" is such a cool name. How is it that we have no superhero named "Nightsnake" yet? I think I might write me a comic book!)
Anyway, Mulcahy teamed up with Martinez Gomez, an expert on the Revillagigedo Islands of which Clarion was one.
And here's what they did:
They studied Beebe's field notes!
Think about this for a moment. If all they had was a snake in a jar and maybe the name of an island, the job of finding the snake again would have to be completely relearned. They would have the end result of the expedition, some vague idea about how to proceed, but no practical steps to lead them to the preferred result.
Then to replicate the results of the first mission would have been a grueling, time consuming and expensive ordeal of reeducation-trial and error all over again compounded by the frustration of knowing the time and money being wasted in the process.
Sounds painful right?
And yet businesses do this every day. I'll bet yours is doing it in some way right now.
We run from project to project not even taking a moment to reflect on the project just done. Don't you know that your planning for the next similar project begins by the debriefing of the last one?
While the trials and tribulations, the successes and failures of a project are still fresh in the minds of all, get the team together to discuss what went right and what went wrong. What you want to repeat and what you want to avoid next time. Make notes. Create processes. Drop the breadcrumbs so you know the trail you walked.
You tell me you don't have the time to debrief and I'll tell you that often people don't have money because they don't invest it well. Same with time.
The time, stress and money saved by proper debriefing are well worth the investment.
Ask Mulcahy and Gomez.
They went to Clarion in the month of May, the same month Beebe went. They replicated Beebe's steps to a "t". His notes were clear, concise, instructive. Beebe is long dead and they could still follow in his steps verbatim eighty years later.
"Basically, following those directions, we essentially put ourselves in his place," said Martinez Gomez.
That's what good debriefing does. When you're ready to face the same or a similar challenge again, it puts you right in the place you were when you last overcame it.
And a graduate student, who joined Mulcahy's and Gomez's expedition, standing right where Beebe had stood eighty years earlier, rediscovered the Clarion nightsnake.
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