Learning from Lessons Learned

In a recent post I had mentioned how lessons learned would become visibly useful when it became possible to substantiate the impact of lessons learned.  Where knowledge is closely integrated to business operations, it becomes easier to track the use of such knowledge and the impact it has had on the business – either in terms of improvement in business performance measures, a positive impact on process measures, or measurable impact on people metrics.  However, the challenge usually lies in the fact that lessons learned are seldom directly linked to performance measures.  More often than not, they remain as lessons identified in the knowledge repository, with no measurable or tangible evidence of such lessons actually being put in use.

With the proliferation of enterprise social collaboration, does it make the task of tracking the dissemination of lessons learned any easier?  Is there any way of finding out if the lesson learned from a previous project or experience has been implemented elsewhere?  Or has some similar work been carried out in any other part of the organization which is quite similar to the experience based on which this lesson was learned?  A community of practice is probably the first place one is likely to check for such instances.  When groups of people with similar interests share a platform in which discussions happen, it is quite likely that such topics are discussed, and more evidence can be gathered about such lessons.  Evidence of a lesson learned elsewhere which crops up in discussions in a community of practice is one of the first signals that a lesson is being taken seriously, and is likely to find implementation elsewhere in the organization. 

Tracking the network of people associated with a particular community of practice can provide pointers to how well the information has been dispersed across the organization.  Where formal learning structures are integrated as part of the enterprise social network, it is also possible to associate these lessons learned to the formal learning structures.  For example, a simple survey or a quiz usually evokes a lot of interest among the community; and the response can be an indicator of how well this lesson has been picked up across the network.  Further, a link to the lesson where the answers are incorrect, or even providing that as a reference is likely to increase the people who will get to read this.  However, this does not necessarily guarantee implementation of a lesson learned.  All we can inference from such statistics is that there has been sufficient dispersion of this message across the network.

The package of practice is the other likely place one can possibly evidence the impact of lessons learned.  Where a process or a procedure has been changed, being able to trace it to the influence of the community, and to the set of lessons learned that caused the change in process or procedure is not hard to trace.  More often than not, where there is sufficient automation of processes or where processes are executed through standard software, it is quite easy to track the change request and be able to associate it with the appropriate lessons learned.  In such cases, we have far more solid evidence that a particular change in the process or procedure was initiated because of the lessons learned.  The actual implementation is itself traceable.  A word of caution: since we haven’t linked it to actual business performance, we still don’t know whether this finally did result in some positive improvement to the business result.  Nevertheless, we are still ahead of the game in terms of at least being able to quantify the impact of lessons learned to process improvement and / or people improvement.

At the end of the day, the ability to influence a large section of the network is itself going to result in the creation of the tipping point where positive impact will automatically start to flow.  The key then remains as to how enterprise social collaboration can be made an effective tool of engagement such that it brings in more people to contribute and share knowledge.

Would love to hear about actual experiences in organizations where impact of social collaboration has had a positive impact on the business, and how it has been measured.