Organizational Development for Knowledge Management at Water ...

Lessons Learned*
A systematic collection, capturing, and mobilizing approach for ensuring the organization
learns from its successes and mistakes.
Supports: organization learning, decision-making, knowledge retention
LEVEL OF EFFORT
SIZE OF UTILITY
SCOPE OF WORK
HIGH
SCALABLE
WIDE
Many organizations use the term ―lessons learned‖ to describe the way they avoid repeating
mistakes, or ensure building on past successes. Yet a lesson can only be applied if it has been
successfully identified, captured and shared. Even in learning organizations that embrace
knowledge sharing, the process for identifying lessons learned may lack rigor or depth, and end
up as a generic statement in a report sitting on the shelf gathering dust (or its electronic
equivalent). Lessons learned can be collected many ways (meetings, reports, conversations,
and so forth) and conveyed in many forms (notes, videos, diagrams, databases, and so forth).
Collison and Parcell (reference below) describe ten key steps to consider capturing lessons
learned. Similar to the After Action Review process, they must occur as soon after an event as
possible: call the meeting, invite the right people, appoint a facilitator, revisit the objectives and
deliverables of the project, go through the project step-by-step, ask what went well, find out why
these aspects went well, and express the learning as advice or guidelines for the future, ask
what could have gone better, ensure that participants leave with their feelings acknowledged,
record the meeting.
While in this process identifying and recording lessons learned may be a fairly straightforward
process (see Sample Lessons Learned Report), this is only part of the knowledge
management cycle. Lessons learned and the guidelines they spawn have no intrinsic value; the
benefits come from ensuring that the lessons are effectively applied. See Knowledge Sharing,
Knowledge Mobilization, Group Learning, and Communications Publications. Documenting and
applying lessons learned is an important part of the strategy presented in Case Example #12
(AMREF Kenya).
Lessons learned can be critical for an organization’s survival. When this is the case, formal
collection, analysis and knowledge mobilization processes should be developed and executed.
For example, a few days after collector-observers from the Center for Army Lessons Learned
(CALL) 1 arrive at a mission, they start sending in observations to headquarters. They report
details on issues and questions outlined in a data collection plan. This raw data is then turned
over to CALL analysts. To obtain feedback on the data, analysts post observations on
electronic bulletin boards and electronic mailing lists that reach communities of experts and
other interested people. The bulletin boards are open forums anyone can access, so that they
create a broad, generalized audience. The mailing lists deal with a specific subject or specialty.
A subscriber to the list receives all the messages posted to the list that day, and can also post
messages to be read by all the other subscribers. Thus the mailing list’s audience is a
community of people interested in a certain subject, what could be described as a community of
interest.
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