Learning

There is little doubt, that most leaders across industry will state a desire to have a learning organisation. Many will have individuals, or perhaps whole departments, whose sole purpose is to learn from experience and improve processes. In the private sector, this is what gives an organisation the 'competetive edge'. However, there are multiple reasons why the rest of the workforce will, either consciously or not, display behaviours that limit the ability of an organisation to learn.

Not only will people's behaviours often prevent organisational learning, so will the organiasation's policies, procedures and equipment if not properly designed. This is evidenced by reports and investigations, which litter the internet, highlighting lessons that should e learned and have been presented to organisations multiple times. 

One of the simplest barriers to learning is the language we use. Often we have heard teams refer to 'lessons learned' logs. As you can imagine the inference in this title is that the lesson has already been embedded within the companies vernacular. And a busy manger who reads the report from such a log may well be falsly comforted. However, if we introduced this as a 'lessons identified' log we are imediately prompted to ask, 'how then do we learn from them'.

Too often lessons are identified, but learning is not realised. We help organisations to:

  1. Identify methodologies for learning lessons
  2. Establish baselines from which learning can be identified
  3. Develop audit-able processes to track the process of learning
  4. provide assurance that lessons are, in fact, learned by the organisation
  5. Look at Human Factors and cultural barriers to learning

One of the simplest barriers to learning is the language we use. Often we have heard teams refer to 'lessons learned' logs. As you can imagine the inference in this title is that the lesson has already been embedded within the companies vernacular. And a busy manger who reads the report from such a log may well be falsly comforted. However, if we introduced this as a 'lessons identified' log we are imediately prompted to ask, 'how then do we learn from them'.

We have worked with large public sector organisations to implement national learning systems. We are a partner organisation of CGE Risk Managment, a provider of Bowtie analysis software. We have effectively deployed this methodology within the Fire and Rescue Service in the UK, allowing the implementation of an operational learning platform,system and culture, which has been recognised by the HSE as an exemplar of good practice as well as winning awards such as the CIR magazine Risk Management Awards and Gov News Direct Public Sector paperless awards.