Cover -- The Lessons Learned Handbook: Practical Approaches to Learning from Experience -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of figures and tables -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- 1 Introduction - learning lessons -- Learning in organisations -- Lessons learned systems in organisations -- How well do they work? -- The value of learning lessons -- Reference -- 2 Elements of a lesson learning system -- Lesson learning approaches in the 15th century -- What is a 'lesson learned'? -- The steps in learning a lesson -- Closing the learning loop -- Trial and error, or trial and success? -- Survey results -- References -- 3 Lessons learned approaches -- Formal collect systems -- Informal collect systems -- Formal connect systems -- Informal connect systems -- A blended approach -- Reference -- 4 Principles of lesson identification -- When to identify lessons? -- The principles of lesson identification -- Aiming for the 'quality lesson' -- Examples of poor lessons -- Stories and lessons -- Self-identification of lessons versus lesson identification processes -- The questioning process - the metaphor of the tree -- Roles and accountabilities in lesson identification -- Reference -- 5 Processes of lessons identified -- Post-project reviews or retrospects -- After action reviews -- Individual learning interviews -- Learning histories -- Evaluations and assessments -- Incident investigation -- 6 Writing down the lessons -- Each lesson stands alone -- The lesson needs to be easy to follow and well structured -- How much context? -- Who is the audience? -- Attachments -- Quality assurance and validation -- Lessons must lead to action -- 7 Taking action -- Will there always be an action? -- What sort of actions are needed? -- How do you decide the action? -- Who assigns the action? -- Escalating the action -- Closing lessons.

8 Process ownership and process update -- Who owns the processes? -- Local vs company process owners -- The role of the process owner -- Engagement with the learning cycle -- Lessons workflow -- Validation and escalation -- Documenting processes -- 9 Ensuring lessons and updated processes are re-applied -- Broadcasting new lessons and process improvements -- Process improvements and training -- Process review as part of operations -- 10 Technology to support lesson learning -- Lesson repositories -- Knowledge libraries -- Publish and search technology -- Tagging -- References -- 11 Sharing and seeking the unwritten lessons -- Communities of practice -- Peer assist -- Baton passing -- Knowledge handover -- Promoting conversation -- 12 The governance of lesson learning -- A governance framework -- Make corporate expectations clear -- Lesson learning systems -- Monitoring and measurement -- The supporting organisation -- Reference -- 13 The principles and processes of safety investigations -- What happened and why? -- The investigation process -- The final report -- 14 Learning lessons in networks at Mars, Inc -- Learn from where we are -- Learn from what we know -- Learn from the past six months -- Formalising the learning -- Summary -- 15 Wikis as part of a learning system -- a conversation with Peter Kemper -- 16 How not to learn lessons -- 17 Conclusions -- Index.