If caught in a minefield, don't turn around! Instead, back out.
—A Lesson Learned, U.S. Army, 1997
"Lessons learned" are project debriefs, which are sometimes referred to as "postmortems." These debriefs, held at the end of a project with the full team, collect a list of what went wrong, what went right, and what one can do to improve procedures the next time around. Typical items showing up on project debriefs include avoiding scope creep (adding features but not allotting time or budget to build them) and better management of expectations for the project.
The only problem with postmortems is that the vast majority of recommendations that come out of them are never implemented, ending up in the corporate morgue, the backroom filing cabinets, or someone's hard drive—one more round of perfunctory rituals in a bureaucratic organization with no teeth because there is no follow-on reinforcement.
In the 1980s, however, an unlikely group paved the way for putting lessons learned into action, namely the U.S. Army, one of the most bureaucratic organizations on earth. The Army had made an important discovery: In Vietnam, rather than fighting a nine-year war, they had in effect fought a one-year battle nine times over. Because of officer-rotation policies, there had been no carryover of lessons learned from one mission to the next.
As a result of these findings and in order to mount a continuous learning architecture, the Army in 1985 founded the Center for Army Lessons Learned. Similar to postmortems and project wrap up meetings, this group began to compile lessons learned from "after-action reviews" in the field. The next step the army took was to devise a system for actually applying these "lessons learned" back in the field. They began by distributing them back to the field through e-mails, for application on the next mission. As a Harvard Business School case study reported, "the Army perfected a remarkably efficient process for correcting mistakes and sustaining successes" (see Fastpaths 1997, Ricks).
Sweeping metaphors and grand themes are far less helpful than the knowledge of how individuals and organizations learn on a daily basis. The key to success is mastery of details.
—David Garvin
The lessons-learned process, first modeled by the U.S. Army, is a simple one and consists of four steps:
Collect. Collect the lessons learned using live interviews, group debriefs, and e-mailed questionnaires.
Compile. Select and edit the lessons.
Distribute. Disseminate to project leaders or targeted personnel.
Enforce Application to New Projects. This is the key point in the entire process. Rewards, recognitions, and compensation are in order to help support follow-through.
Although lessons learned is a simple concept, problems can arise with reinforcement of the lessons. Organizations are better at maintaining the status quo than learning and changing. They may pay lip service to learning from experience or continuous process improvement, and yet do nothing about it. But implementation of even the most basic "lessons learned" can bring about enormous rewards in terms of organizational efficiency. Moreover, the infrastructure involved can be as simple as a Word document on an e-mail system. The lessons-learned field (and its potential ROI) is still largely untapped.
1997 | Thomas Ricks: "Lessons Learned: Army Devises System to Decide What Does, and Does Not, Work: Corporate America Watches with Interest," Wall Street Journal (May 23, 1997). |
2000 | David Garvin: Learning in Action: A Guide to Putting the Learning Organization to Work. |
See also Action Learning
A hard lesson—that may do thee good.
—Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, 1600