A Holistic Approach to Lessons Learned

How Organizations Can Benefit from Their Own Knowledge

Moria Levy

• Publisher: Auerbach Publications
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138564763
  9781138564763
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351235525
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Opérations

The book presents a holistic approach to organization performance improvements by lessons learned management. Such an approach is required because specific methods, such as debriefing, task management or procedures updates, do not achieve actual improvements. The presented model spans the entire life cycle of lessons learned: Starting from creating new lessons, moving on to knowledge refining and ending with smart integration into the organizational environment so future re-use of knowledge is enabled. The model also addresses other sources of organizational learning including quality processes and employee experience utilization.

PART I
THE NEED

1
A WORLD FULL OF CHALLENGES

Welcome to the world of business in the twenty-first century. As with many things in life, this business world is misleading. It may seem like the same world and the same rules as those we followed 20 years ago, back at the end of the twentieth century, but it is quite different. New challenges have emerged, yielding the necessity to continually learn—on an almost-daily basis—to survive and excel. Sticking to outdated solutions (successful as they might have been) is a downfall to be avoided.

The Role of Knowledge

The first important issue we must recognize when analyzing these new conditions is that we live in an era of knowledge. Knowledge makes the world go round. Businesses perform better based on their knowledge and how they use it to leverage their performance. Organizations strive to know and to succeed based on what they know.

This was not how things were in the twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s, companies were preoccupied by the question of how to lower prices based on process efficiency. Companies invested in analyzing each process, understanding which subprocesses were included, and developing optimal ways to handle each of these specific subprocesses. Whoever could optimize better could lower costs and thus sell more. Every company had an organization and methods unit, which was in charge of defining the processes, determining how many employees were needed, and how much time were required for each process.

At the dawn of the 1980s, a new trend arrived. It no longer sufficed to (only) be cheap; customers were seeking higher quality. The standard of living had increased, and companies were competing to provide higher quality goods. In the 1980s organizations spoke in terms of quality assurance and Total Quality Management. Quality assurance units were implemented everywhere and quality audits frequently took place. The National Institutes of Standards and Technology defined—in addition to regulations—a series of quality standards, and organizations followed.

The 1990s were different. Customers still wanted low prices, but they were willing to pay more for additional quality and functionality. The most important aspect became time. Companies understood that “time is money.” By this I am not referring to the original meaning of the phrase (seeking efficiency) but rather to a new interpretation—that is, the first to the market, leads it. In pharmaceutical companies, this always was the case. Whoever came out with a unique drug first blocked others; therefore, time was always precious. Most organizations, however, could afford to take their time, thoroughly considering new products, debating what was right to develop, and how to develop it. This was no longer the case. During the 1990s, agile and spiral modes of development emerged. What was most important was to be “out there” first, or at least as soon as possible. Many products were announced and shortly later disappeared. It felt like a revolving carousel in an amusement park, spinning faster and faster, with no time to breathe.

Toward the end of the 1990s, commercial Internet burst into our lives. Now price, quality, and time were not enough. Information, and later knowledge, became the new commodities enabling organizations to excel.

The term “knowledge workers” was coined by Peter Drucker in Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959). Knowledge workers were defined as employees whose success was affected significantly by knowledge. Examples of such employees included architects, consultants, physicians, and teachers. In the following years, the notion of knowledge workers was elaborated. Drucker taught us all in The Practice of Management (1954) that organizations will succeed if they manage their processes effectively. In 1999, writing in Management Challenges for the 21st Century), Drucker introduced us to yet another new paradigm of management and changed our basic assumptions about the practices and principles of management. He stated the success of organizations—both profit and nonprofit organizations—will depend on the efficiency of management of the knowledge workers (Drucker, 1999). At that time, 25% of employees were considered knowledge workers.

As of 2017, nearly two decades later, the majority of employees working at an average organization are considered knowledge workers—whether bankers, carpenters, or sales representatives. Knowledge is a key component in the success of almost every role in the organization.

The conclusion is clear: knowledge is significant to employees’ success. Thus, knowledge is significant to organizations’ success.

Competition

Even with this clear conclusion, life is not as simple as one would hope. One could assume that the rules of the game have not changed and that the competition to which we are accustomed has only slightly changed. We might think that knowledge becoming the excelling factor was the only major change organizations had experienced. Well, that would just be wishful thinking. Cyber technology has changed our connectivity. “The world is a global village,” states a familiar expression. In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (2000), Thomas Friedman emphasized this connectivity’s significance and introduced us to new meanings and implications of this togetherness, once unfathomable. In this new world, geographic location is far less important than it used to be. One can get an X-ray in one country, and someone on the opposite side of the globe can examine the films within minutes, and then send back the medical analysis signed by a doctor who does not even speak the same language as the patient.

Another example of this global connectivity may be demonstrated in the following scenario. Someone calls the customer service of his or her cellular phone, experiencing a problem. On the other side of the phone, a service representative answers. That representative might sound local to the extent of using a familiar accent, which he or she has practiced especially for the job. In reality, however, that representative may be answering the call from the other side of the globe.

Starkly contrasting this scenario with 20 or 30 years ago, twenty-first-century knowledge work also is off-shored. Digitally purchased goods can be provided, in many cases, from everywhere to anywhere. In the past, only large stable companies participated in off-shore business. Nowadays, every organization that can get the job done, and has a convincing website, is relevant.

On the one hand, this could be an advantage, as we can sell our goods to far more customers; we no longer are in a “small red sea, rather in a new big blue ocean” (Kim and Mauborgne, 2005). On the other hand, we are not out here alone, and this ocean (or globe) is full of competitors, all claiming to be the best in the field. One could assume that this change is a minor one, as the market and competitors seem to have emerged in the same ratio. But this is not the situation. The digital changes enable new competitors to join in. These may be small companies working from a home office two blocks away; a company from a developing country that had sold its solution for years, but had suffered from small markets before globalization; or even three teenagers working out of a basement. In these new terms, it can be any company that can offer us what we request.

What is clear is that the world of providers is crowded. Competition is almost impossible, and excelling is more important than ever. Customers have alternatives. Knowledge is the key to excelling in twenty-first-century markets.

External Information

We have established that knowledge is a major factor to achieving success, and because the market is crowded, excellence is a hard goal to achieve. Organizations have to excel in using information and knowledge to continue selling services and goods in a world that is no longer as comfortable for suppliers. In this environment, managers have to ask themselves how the organization can provide its employees the information and knowledge they need to perform their jobs most effectively. The answer to this question has two components: external information and internal information. We will start by analyzing the external information.

Without a doubt, the Internet is changing our lives. We are in the middle of an information revolution, and it is therefore not easy to analyze the change. The revolution’s characteristics are not yet clear. Nevertheless, we are already feeling the impact of this tsunami. Studies teach us that the information found on the Internet (and not only there) doubles every 4 years! In this era, more is written and documented than we ever could have dreamed, and a lot of information on the web is shared and can be learned. Some old wise (and unknown) man once said that as the hunger problem that troubled the world in the dawn of the twentieth century has been replaced by obesity problems at the end of the century, so too has the lack of data and information that characterized the 1960s morphed into a real concern of data and information overflow by the end of the twentieth century.

This problem, however, does not seem as severe as we experienced it even 10–15 years ago. More concisely, it might not even be a problem. Do not confuse the issue: information and data continue to double in quantity every 4 years. What has changed is accessibility. Technology has changed the rules. First, communication is much faster. We no longer have to wait (seconds that seemed like minutes that seemed like an eternity) to access information on servers on the other side of the globe. Second, and more important, search engines have become much smarter. Search engines, developed by Google and others, combine human intelligence with advanced mathematical algorithms, yielding improved search results. For years, search engines included only advanced algorithms, trying to predict the more relevant and interesting results people will want to access before others (the professional term is ranking). Now, when these algorithms rely on user behavior, accessibility has improved dramatically, and external information is accessible. We may and can reach it, and we are obligated to use it wherever possible, improving our job performance.

Internal Information and Knowledge

For a few seconds, some may have toyed with the delusion that access to the Internet had washed our problems away. Obviously, this is not the case. Two main things still are missing: internal information and knowledge.

Why do we need internal information if such a vast amount of external information is available on the web? We need it because context matters. We need it because this specific information is relevant to our specific organization that has specific services and provides and performs in a specific market and under specific conditions. Furthermore, the information presents us as a unique organization. Information available on the Internet may support the working processes, yet it is in the wider circle. The core information, in most cases, is inside the organization.

Knowledge, however, is a different story. The external world does contain information, even if it cannot serve as a unique source, complementing the existing internal information. The web, however, contains much less knowledge. Even in cases in which it includes best practices and know-how, it lacks context, and therefore, it ultimately lacks the ability to effectively use these practices and know-how in action.

This is an organizational issue, and the organization must provide its employees the knowledge that is critical for job performance and success.

So where is this knowledge? Does it even exist? Is it tacit or implicit? What is its nature? How can it be located, and how can it be useful and accessible to the knowledge worker?

Review the knowledge you wish your organization would hand you. Think about the things that would help you perform your job better. What kind of knowledge would you wish to have? Now think about this for one more minute. What percent of this knowledge would you get if you requested it? What portion of this knowledge does your organization even have? What is documented? What is shared? What is easy to access?

Although organizations differ from one another, most organizations’ answers to these questions do not. Every organization holds all sorts of knowledge. There is knowledge that is known only to a specific employee or team. In some cases, the knowledge exists as it was documented at the end of some project or after a debriefing session. In other cases, the knowledge was developed through an International Organization for Standardization or Capability Maturity Model Integration effort; auditors might have found that some task was not performing correctly, and after analyzing and discussing the problem thoroughly, those auditors (or maybe the team) found a way to improve the process. And so, new knowledge was developed. In other cases, people have the knowledge and even use it, yet it never has been articulated. This is typical when knowledge has been learned during the work process and remains tacit; the employees, in some cases, are not even aware of the reasons they perform in a particular way, or why they do not choose some other path for a specific task. Time after time, we perform tasks, and we may not even be aware of the knowledge we have regarding this task. Of course, employees also hold relevant knowledge that they achieved in a former job, or former organization, and that now serves them at their current job. This knowledge is not always shared.

Above all, there is the potential knowledge: the knowledge we could have acquired had we not missed the opportunity. Most organizations, on too many occasions, do not elaborate on what has happened so that they can analyze and learn how to improve their performance next time. Also, if they unexpectedly succeed, learning can take place, enabling organizations to over perform again in the future. Nevertheless, this is a rare phenomenon.

So, how come organizations stop and learn? Do we want to excel? Of course we want to succeed. Yet there are many reasons why we do not study our lessons, develop the organizational potential knowledge, and prevent similar problems from recurring. The most popular reason is time. To be exact: lack of time. We are always in a rush, performing the next five tasks that we tried to accomplish yesterday and still cannot find the time to start, end, or advance. We tend to prefer the most urgent tasks at every given moment, thus leaving less time and attention for important, future-oriented tasks. Developing new knowledge certainly falls into the “more important but less urgent tasks” category. The point is that less knowledge for us is less knowledge for the organization. Sadly, we have fewer tools to better our performance in this age of competition than we should and could have.

Furthermore, even when we do debrief and develop the knowledge, we tend to only partially use it, failing to utilize the insights that we already have gained. After action reviews, among other types of debriefing sessions, are held with naturally limited attendance. Following the session, a report or a slide presentation is sent out to all who attended and other relevant stakeholders. At this stage we might even feel satisfied. Knowledge was developed efficiently and shared. The next stages leave many less optimistic. Say three groups get the e-mail containing the lessons learned. The first group consists of the people who attended the debriefing session. Only a minority of these will bother opening the e-mail because it is just one less e-mail to read. In some rare cases, they will file the report and presentation somewhere, probably in the context of the project, event, or process it had to do with. The second group includes those employees who were not invited to join the session. In some cases, they will briefly skim through the documents, many of them not fully comprehending the bullet points or contents. In many cases, the e-mail will be transferred to the “trash” file without even being read as people are overloaded with e-mails and thus attem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Author
• Part I The Need
• Part II Creating the Knowledge
• Part III Managing Created Knowledge
• Part IV Returning to the Previous Day
• Part V Implementing the Life-Cycle Model of Lessons and Good Practices Management
• Index