7 Ways to Leverage Lessons Learned

Few would disagree that learning from the past makes good sense. Past performance is the best indicator of future performance, right? We can improve the future performance and results of almost any endeavor by looking back to see what worked and what didn’t – if we actually apply what we have learned.
While most organizations practice some form of capturing Lessons Learned, does anyone really learn from them? How do they do it? What are the top 7 things you can do to actually learn from your mistakes and successes?
Why We Don’t Learn from Lessons Learned
Most organizations encourage and even require that employees capture Lessons Learned.
In some firms, the activity of capturing is ad-hoc or only practiced when something has gone terribly wrong. This is often more a “Who’s to Blame” exercise than a useful learning experience.
In other organizations there is a formal and often laborious process, requiring that someone document all of the learnings from the project or process. Tomes of data are created that are difficult to access and few people ever read or revisit.

Top 5 Complaints about Lesson Learned Practices
Here are some common complaints about Lesson Learned Practices

1. “It’s a pain to weed through all the irrelevant lessons to get to the few ‘jewels’. There should be better, easier way to find the lessons that pertain to me.”
2. “It takes almost two weeks to review the lessons in the database. Who’s got the time for that?”
3. “We seem to learn some lessons over and over again.”
4. “Until we can adopt an attitude that admits frankly to what really worked and didn’t work, I find many of these tools to be suspect.”
5. “Despite all the effort we put into capturing the data, I see no evidence that lessons are being applied toward future success.”

7 Best Practices to Leverage Lessons Learned
Firms that derive benefits from Lessons Learned incorporate many of the following practices.

1. Capture and retrieval is relatively easy. Capture may require someone to be at a keyboard to write up the information, but retrieval from an electronic database is relatively easy.
2. Companies employ a “google-type” database for capture and retrieval of lessons learned.
3. Lessons learned are categorized in a variety of ways, including by project, desired outcome, or a specific step in a process.
4. The best systems allow for lessons to be captured as they occur, or at key milestones, rather than waiting for the end of project or process when memories are weak and other projects and priorities have taken precedence.
5. Lessons learned are part of the culture, both in the doing (capturing) and in the utilization (applying). This means that it is more than a check-off box on a form. People generating the learnings know that there is a high probability that the best learnings will surface in the actions on the next project/event. Also, there are gates that will prohibit a project/event from going forward if the quality control process has not been followed.
6. Ownership is clear. Someone makes sure that the recording part of lessons learned gets done and that the ideas are put into practice. Also, there are consequences for not using the lessons learned/new practices.
7. People receive training and know how to use the Lessons Learned System. Ideally this is hands-on, practical training where they:

• hear about the tool,
• see how it might be applied, practice it in a structured exercise – preferably using a real project/event,
• Review their reaction to it and ideas for implementation.

Conclusions
If lessons learned are seen as useful and necessary to one’s job, as well as increasing the success of the organization, then they will be tracked, discussed and used.
There is no denying that capturing lessons learned takes effort. But this effort can produce tremendous benefit if the organization actually applies the hard-earned knowledge.
Why not go the extra mile by implementing some of the best practices described above so that you can actually start reaping the benefits of a Lessons Learned process?
If any of this strikes a chord with you, give us a call. WSA has conducted Lessons Learned activities for projects – capital improvement and remediation – as well as for organizations from a wide variety of industries – engineering, energy, manufacturing and government. Call to arrange a time to speak to one of our staff so that we can share our knowledge with you.
Article by, Paul Stimson and courtesy of Work Systems Affiliates

Originally posted by Candice A