Lessons Learned Experience - develop sustainable systems to learn successfully from past experiences and failures
From the perspective of management experts a learning organization is one which is able to respond quickly and in a flexible manner to the business environment by adjusting rapidly to changes in the business ecosystem through a process of trial and error and learning the path that maximizes commercial success. The best suited organization structure to achieve the appropriate level of autonomy to effectively maximize commercial success is a decentralized organization structure. Unfortunately such an organization structure suppresses learning about prioritizing and addressing risks that have a high severity and impact but only a rare chance of occurrence.
An organization is said to have learnt from an incident if it responds to the situation by making relevant changes to procedures, resource and outcome priorities, performance indicators or even organizational structure that it envisages would reduce both severity and probability of recurrence of the said incident. Usually such changes are approved by individuals at the top of the organization. In this context it is important that organizations put in place a sustainable system to design, develop, implement and improve the learning process for the organization itself and not just for the individuals that make up the organization.
Therefore learning organizations are those that have structures and procedures in place to ensure that lessons learnt from incidents and other process non conformities are themselves incorporated as organizational changes. To be more specific such organizations shall have developed reporting procedures and assigned resources for analyzing such reports and identifying appropriate corrective and preventive actions.
Organizational learning is dependent on individual learning by people at the top of the organization. Changes to structure, resource allocation shall only happen if the people at the top of the organization are convinced about the need for such a change.
While analyzing the background of lessons learnt it is important to distinguish between experienced based learning and theoretical learning.
Experience based learning or inductive learning is dependent on feedback from our own experience. If we do something that provides us a benefit without any negative consequence then that behavior shall be positively reinforced while on the other hand if have a negative consequence then we are less likely to repeat the same behavior. This is trial and error learning which is probably the most effective and basic form of human learning.
The other form of learning which is theoretical learning or deductive learning, involves learning from the experience of others by seeking out new information, problem solving and remembering.
The problem is that when it comes to situations with work place risks that have a high severity but a remote possibility of occurrence such modes of learning are actually in conflict. If taking a short cut successfully in the past has rendered a barrier redundant then it has already become a norm to bypass that barrier while performing that task. Experience based learning often has precedence over theoretical learning and this situation potentially contributes to a complacent mindset leading to a work place disaster.