The Lessons Learned Handbook

Practical Approaches to Learning from Experience

Nick Milton

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781780631929
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The phrase "lessons learned" is such a common one, yet people struggle with developing effective lessons learned approaches. The Lessons Learned Handbook is written for the project manager, quality manager or senior manager trying to put in place a system for learning from experience, or looking to improve the system they have. Based on experience of successful and unsuccessful systems, the author recognises the need to convert learning into action. For this to happen, there needs to be a series of key steps, which the book guides the reader through. The book provides practical guidance to learning from experience, illustrated with case histories from the author, and from contributors from industry and the public sector.

• The book is a practitioner-level guide to the design and the mechanics of lessons learned processes
• Takes a holistic approach, tracking lessons from identification to reapplication
• Makes the case for the assignment of actions for learning

1

Introduction – learning lessons

Learning as a basic instinct

Learning from experience is the most basic of human activities. We all do it – even babies do it. They learn to smile. Through experimentation, through trial and error, and through trial and success, they learn that by manipulating certain muscles in their face, they can get a response from Mum and Dad. A little later, they find further muscle combinations that create sounds that obtain an even greater reward – ‘Baby’s first word’.

Babies are little learning machines, and grow up to be big learning machines. Stimuli and responses from the outside world are acquired, connected via neural pathways to existing mental models held in memory, compared against those models, and the mental models updated over time.

As a child grows older, she moves from unconscious learning to conscious learning. She decides there is something she wants to learn, and sets out to learn it. Maybe she wants to whistle, skip or climb trees. She may ask her friends, she may ask her parents, or her parents may take the initiative in teaching her something important, such as road sense, or reading. This is when learning first starts to become a problem. Have you tried to teach a toddler that throwing a tantrum in Tesco would be a bad idea? Or that putting biscuits into the CD player won’t deliver anything of value? You are trying to help the toddler learn from your experience, rather than from his experience, and he doesn’t want to cooperate. He has got on very well, thank you, learning from his own experience, and he wants to try a tantrum and see what happens. He wants to put a biscuit in the CD player and see what happens. He doesn’t want to learn from you, he wants to learn from experience.

It is easy to learn from experience, if the experiences are powerful enough. You only have to put your fingers in the toaster once, to know that it is a bad idea. It is a lot more challenging, but a lot more beneficial, to learn from the experiences of others. If the experiences are bad, we would rather not learn the hard way by experiencing them ourselves, and as parents, we don’t want our toddlers to learn lessons the hard way. We would rather pass on lessons, for the sake of all concerned. We would rather warn them in advance about the toaster.

Learning in organisations

If learning is such a natural activity, why is it so difficult for organisations to learn? If babies and toddlers can learn, why can’t companies?

Perhaps we ought to ask, can an organisation really learn? Is learning something that organisations can do? Wikipedia tells us that learning is ‘one of the most important mental functions of humans, animals and artificial cognitive systems’, but organisations aren’t humans, they aren’t animals, and they aren’t artificial cognitive systems. Unlike animals, organisations have no brains, so do they actually have anything to learn with? Does an organisation have a memory, or mental models that they can update based on stimuli and responses?

One company I have been working with believes that the route to organisational learning lies solely in having skilled and educated staff. They have mapped out the competences of their staff and identified the gaps, and their strategy to fill the gaps is to hire skilled staff, and to set up a programme of training for the staff they have, in order to close the gap. For this company, organisational learning is delivered through staff training.

However, many people recognise that organisations can learn above and beyond the sum of individual ‘learning people’. Teams can learn, communities can learn, disciplines and projects can learn, just as an individual can learn. They can learn from experience, whether this is their own experience, or experience from other teams, other communities, or other functions and disciplines. It is this vision of ‘learning from experience’ that has led so many companies to set up a lessons learned process, so that if something does not go according to plan, they hope the company as a whole can reflect on what has happened, draw lessons from the past, and vow not to repeat them in future.

However, we will find in this book that lesson learning in organisations is far more complex than it is for a baby or a toddler. An organisation is not a single or connected brain. There are no sensory neurons carrying messages of stimulus and response to the memory centres. An organisation does not contain connected learning pathways, unless we deliberately introduce them.

Lessons learned systems in organisations

Let us start by asking how common lesson-learning attempts are in organisations. Do the majority of organisations have a lesson-learning system? Certainly most of the organisations that I work with have tried to put some system for lesson learning in place for at least some of their activity. This is particularly true of the private sector; there are still some government departments and other public sector bodies which have no lessons learned approach, but almost all of the private sector organisations for which I consult have made some attempt to ensure that lessons are learned.

To see whether my experience was representative, I commissioned a survey of lessons learned processes and systems when I started writing this book. Of the 70 people who replied to the survey, 76 per cent said that their organisation has a lessons learned system in place in at least one major part of their activity (Figure 1.1). A further 7 per cent were in the process of introducing one, 6 per cent had previously had a lessons learned system, but had abandoned it, while 11 per cent had no system.

Figure 1.1 Organisations with a lessons learned process (%)

Within the organisations in this sample, lessons learned systems or approaches are widespread: they are in place or in progress in more than 80 per cent of organisations. The urge to learn therefore seems common.

I also asked which part of the business hosts these lessons learned systems. Responses are shown in Table 1.1, showing that lesson learning has been attempted as part of project management, bidding, software development, safety, operations and research and development (R&D).

Table 1.1

The parts of a business that host lessons learned systems

Part of business	No. of organisations
Project management	24
All activity	7
Software deployment and release	4
Bidding and pitching	3
Industrial safety	3
R&D	2
Operations	2
Other	11

So it seems common for organisations to attempt to learn lessons, and it seems as though there is a wide number of applications of lesson learning. But how well does lesson learning work?

How well do they work?

Even though the majority of people who responded to my survey have a system or an approach for learning lessons in their organisations, I also know from experience that these systems do not always work well. Case studies 1.1 and 1.2 illustrate this. These are drawn from in-depth learning assessments, and include quotes from staff interviewed within the companies. In the first case, a lessons learned system was theoretically in place, but was hardly applied at all. In the second case the system was more centralised and incentivised, but the difficulties in accessing lessons and concerns over lesson quality meant that the lessons were seldom reused. Neither of these systems were delivering the routine and systematic performance improvements that could have been possible.

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