Many years ago, my manager once asked me, “what would the COE look like?”

A COE, or correction of error, is a report written after something goes pretty wrong. It’s a structured way to learn from mistakes with clear separation of customer impact, detection, mitigation, and the 5-why series of questions that ensure we are addressing root causes, not symptoms.

I really enjoy unpacking learnings through COEs. My teams and I have written them, and I even became a COE bar raiser to help others. In multiple organizations, I have taught people to celebrate learning from mistakes, rather than trying to hide from them or, worse, seeking only to blame.

Those initial words of “what would the COE look like” were not designed to change my course of action but rather to test my thinking. If something did go wrong, how would I write about it? Would I feel good writing that all the obvious issues had mitigations, that customer experience was protected, and that we had done our best to plan? Or would I have to describe bad decision making and obvious mistakes that resulted in impact to customers?

I genuinely still hear the question in my head from time to time, and it continues to be a good way of testing my priorities. We all want to deliver and launch, but sometimes we let trade-offs and risks creep in with limited consideration.

Next time you start to feel a twinge of concern about your project, consider what the COE would look like. If you are doing all the right things, maybe it’s just the tension leading up to launch. If you aren’t, it’s good to surface risks and start discussions.