LfE: The Learning Manual - Usable Buildings...gets into the system, and ensure its integrity....

Learning from Experience

The Manual

February 2003

Draft 4 - JAN03

Draft 4 - JAN03

BAA

“Our ability to apply the best available knowledge is akey point of difference for us in the marketplace”

(Bovis Lend Lease)

“If it’s that easy, why aren’t we doing it already?”(a Transco engineer, after a Hindsight workshop)

“That was the most productive meetingwe’ve had in 3 years of partnering”

(a Director of Partnerships First, after aHindsight workshop)

“I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do andI understand”

(Confucius, Chinese sage, 551-479 BC)

“Truth springs from arguments amongst friends”(David Hume, Scottish philosopher, 1711-76)

Acknowledgments

The Learning Toolkit was developed by David Bartholomew Associates and Gardiner & Theobald in collaboration with:

• Amicus Group• BAA plc• The BP-Bovis Lend Lease Global Alliance• Buro Happold• SecondSite Property plc (previously Lattice Property)• Transco plc (now National Grid Transco)

We are grateful for their invaluable input.

The work was supported by the Department of Trade and Industry through the Partners in Innovation programme. The views expressed are not necessarilythose of the Department.

Draft 5nf - JAN03

ContentsLearning from Experience

Contents

1 Why learn from experience? ........................... 2

2 Learning basics .................................................. 4

Introduction .......................................................................4Principles ..............................................................................5

3 Planning a learning programme .................... 6

Making the business case .........................................6Making it happen: learning as a project ...........6Creating a programme framework ......................6Launching a learning programme.......................8

4 Workshops and interviews .............................. 9Introduction .......................................................................9Planning considerations .......................................... 10Preparing for a workshop ....................................... 10Insight and Hindsight ............................................... 11Leader skills ..................................................................... 13Foresight ........................................................................... 14

5 Creating knowledge ....................................... 16

6 Sharing knowledge ......................................... 17

7 Further reading................................................ 18

1

For further information about the project or for consultancy on learning methods contact:

• David Bartholomew of DBA at [email protected], or• Marion Weatherhead of Gardiner & Theobald at [email protected]

© DBA 2003

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

2 Draft 5-nf - JAN03

We live in a knowledge-driven economy in the information age of aglobalised world. Knowledge has become recognised as one of the keys tobusiness success, and it is written about, managed and valued as neverbefore. But what exactly is it? Where does it come from? And what is it reallyworth?

The knowledge industry likes to blur the distinctions between knowledge,information and data. They do overlap, but the differences matter. Data is toinformation is to knowledge as brick is to wall is to building: data andinformation have only limited value until they are brought together insomebody’s head and transformed into knowledge that can inform action(see box 1). Most ‘knowledge management’ (KM) systems are really just dataor document management systems (see box 2). KM systems can do a greatdeal to make relevant information more accessible, but it still takes humanintelligence to turn it into knowledge and act on it.

We acquire knowledge in three ways: by study, experience or being taught.As a society we invest heavily in learning by study and being taught, but weleave learning from the practical experience of doing a job largely to chance,unconsidered and unresourced. Learning has become increasinglysynonymous with being taught as lecture rooms have replacedapprenticeship. And yet the most highly regarded knowledge isexperiential: chief executives, market traders and footballers are paid fortheir experience, not their university degrees — because that is what createsthe most business value.

It is not perverse to invest in conventional education, but it is perverse toleave learning from experience to chance. The ‘experience’ that is so highlyvalued is not just acquired by living through events, but by learning activelyfrom them. One of the hallmarks of the most successful people andorganisations is their ability to learn from everything they do. This is not justa matter of innate ability: it is a learnable process. Technique andorganisation pay dividends, just as they do in teaching.

Teaching and study usually are the best ways to learn when knowledge canbe ‘codified’ — that is, when it can be reduced to formulae and sets of rules,and stored in a textbook or a hard disk. This is ‘explicit’ knowledge.Management judgement and football skills have to be learned fromexperience because they can only be codified to a limited degree. This is‘tacit’ (or ‘implicit’) knowledge, which exists only in heads. Some is conscious(we know we have it, and we could codify it if we tried); much more isunconscious — we may (or may not) use it, but we could certainly not codifyit. Do you really know how you swim? Could you write it down well enoughso that a non-swimmer could read it and start swimming immediately? Themore complex the task, and the more it depends on a stream of minute-by-minute judgements, the more tacit knowledge outvalues explicit knowledge.

It is no accident that so much management training is based on role-playingand team activities — learning from experience in artificial, designedsituations — rather than classroom teaching, or that Harvard Business Schoolteaches its MBAs almost entirely through intensive discussion of case studies.Even knowledge that is available in books is often better learned fromexperience: as Confucius said, “I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I doand I understand”.

Why learn from experience?

Box 1: Data, Information and Knowledge

You’ve just moved from London to Poole and you decide to realise anold ambition and take up dinghy sailing. You’ve never bought a boatbefore so you go to the Boat Show, but the range on offer is bewildering.Which one would be good to learn in, fun for the family, and give youthe chance to race? Would it be better to buy one that would go ontop of the Volvo, or something a bit bigger? And how much is itreally worth paying? You collect a bag full of brochures, but there’stoo much data to take in. So at Waterloo you look at the magazinesin WH Smith and find one with a comparative review of six models.That contains information you can understand — all the key datain tables for easy comparison, and opinions from experts. You narrowthe choice down to two. But which would be best? On the trainback home a man notices you’re making notes from the magazineand offers some personal knowledge. There’s a friendly sailing clubat Poole that specialises in Mirror dinghys. They organise regularone-design races, and they have trained instructors and a couple ofclub boats which can be hired by the day. You could try one withoutcommitment, and if you decided to buy your own could probably geta good second-hand boat for half the price of a new one.

Box 2: Learning and Knowledge Management

Learning programmes and knowledge management systems arecomplementary: learning programmes create knowledge,knowledge management systems share it.

Learning programmes aim to reveal the know-how that is lockedup in the heads of people and teams (tacit and team knowledge)and use it to solve problems and improve business performance.

Knowledge management (KM) aims to make all the recorded(explicit) knowledge of an organisation easily, quickly and reliablyavailable to everyone, wherever it is and wherever they are.

A knowledge management system is a combination of:

culture: a habit of sharing rather than hoarding informationIT: an organisation-wide electronic storage and access system,typically including a structured filing system (for access to specificdocuments), full-text indexing and searching (for finding documentswhich include specific words, phrases or concepts), financial andstaff record databases, and a common interface for viewing all kindsof documentsprocedures: to ensure that all information which may be usefulgets into the system, and ensure its integrity. Typically, they coverroutine scanning and OCRing of incoming mail, filing of projectdocuments and web downloads, recording of contact and marketintelligence information, and updating of a directory of expertise.

Software alone is not a knowledge management system (whatever itsays on the box).

Learning from Experience Why learn from experience?


The members of a team can collectively possess knowledge of which noneof them is individually aware — team knowledge, spread around in piecesthat mean nothing until they are put together. Historically it may have beenenough for people to learn for themselves, but it no longer is in industries likeconstruction where achievement depends on the combined efforts ofproject teams.

When learning from experience is left to individuals and to chance in amodern industry only a fraction of it is ever turned to business value. In acompetitive world, that is letting one of your best assets go to waste.

With the right tools, the waste can be stopped. As the US Army, BP Amocoand many others have already found (see box 3), a well designed, stronglybacked learning programme can transform performance by:

• putting together the jigsaw pieces of team knowledge and turning it tobusiness value

• helping capture and interpret tacit knowledge, so that it can be madeexplicit and shared

• making people aware of unconscious knowledge, and able to use itbetter.

And, after initial pump-priming, it will pay for itself many times over.

The construction industry has more to gain than most from following the BPexample. As Rethinking Construction says, “. . . continuous learning [is] notpart of construction’s current vocabulary . . . The key premise behind theintegrated project process is that teams of designers, constructors andsuppliers work together through a series of projects, continuouslydeveloping the product and the supply chain, eliminating waste, innovatingand learning from experience.” A learning programme can be one of thebest ways to address the Egan agenda. It can help:

• reduce cost• reduce risk• reduce re-work• reduce waste• increase customer satisfaction• improve quality• fix problems• increase capability• innovate• spread best practice• empower staff• build trust• improve teamwork• promote culture change• support partnering• improve sustainability• increase profit.

This Toolkit shows how to do it. It has been tested on real projects by AmicusGroup, BAA, the BP-Bovis Lend Lease Global Aliance, Buro Happold,SecondSite Property and National Grid Transco. These methods work.

The knowledge iceberg

Conscioustacitknowledge

Explicitknowledge

Unconscioustacitknowledge

Individual

Team

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Box 3: The business value of learning

BP credit their learning programme, supported by their ‘Virtual TeamNetwork’ (an intranet where people and teams post usefulinformation to share with everyone else), with enormousproductivity gains and cost savings.

In two years, they cut the average time needed to drill a deepwaterwell from 100 to 42 days by using the US Army’s After Action Reviewtechnique before, during and after every well to examine and shareexperience with their project partners and asking “What did welearn? How can we do it better next time?”

In 1998, they challenged their Alliance partnership with Bovis LendLease to reduce the build cost of retail petrol stations in Europe by10%. Using the same review techniques, the Alliance delivered $74million of savings within a year and cut costs by 26% in two years.

Oil refineries require major refurbishments — ‘Turnarounds’ —which cost tens of millions of dollars every 4-5 years. In 1998, BPstarted a worldwide programme with the aim of becoming theindustry leader in Turnarounds, and set up a structured programme oflearning reviews and knowledge sharing. Three of the first fourTurnarounds in the programme achieved savings averaging $1million each. The fourth saved nearly $10 million, beating its previoustime by 9 days, cutting costs by 20% and increased the interval tothe next one by 6 months.

BP find the same techniques work in everything they do. They haveused them in business restructuring, improving chemical plantreliability and entry into new retail markets as well as in drilling wells,building petrol stations and refinery Turnarounds. And they havefound that learning and knowledge sharing do not just help makeincremental improvements: they generate ‘breakthrough thinking’that delivers step changes in business efficiency.

Overall, CEO Lord Browne estimated in 1997 that systematic learningand knowledge sharing had generated $4 billion worth ofpermanent improvements in the previous 5 years.

Learning from Experience Why learn from experience?


Introduction

The approach to learning described in this Toolkit was developed jointly byDavid Bartholomew Associates, Gardiner & Theobald, and 6 client organisations,designers and contractors — Amicus, BAA, BP-Bovis Lend Lease Global Alliance,Buro Happold, SecondSite Property and Transco — who tested it on real projects.

It is based on two proven techniques:

• the After Action Review, originally developed by the US Army and sinceadopted (with variations) by BP Amoco and many other successfulcompanies in a variety of sectors, and

• the Learning History, developed by the Sloan School of Management atMIT with input from the Ford Motor Company, Hewlett Packard, AT&T,Federal Express and others

which we have adapted to meet the special needs of UK construction.

It is a toolkit, not a rule kit: it just offers tools and a recipe for getting started. Itcan be used in many ways and circumstances, by organisations big or small.

The techniques are most useful where similar situations are expected to recur,and when the organisation running the learning programme has the authorityto bring all the parties involved in a project into the process. But there areenough common threads running through every organisation’s work, howeverdiverse it appears to be on the surface, to make them valuable anywhere, anduseful lessons can be learned even when they are used solely in-house.

Learning and knowledge management (KM) are complementary. A learningprogramme can be run on its own, or as part of a broader knowledge strategy.In a small company, lessons learned can be shared effectively by personalcontact, and the value added by a KM system may be small. But the larger andmore geographically-dispersed the organisation, the more a KM system canmultiply the value of a learning programme by disseminating lessons learned toa wider audience. At the same time, there is more opportunity in a largeorganisation for learning to become an important source of content for the KMsystem as dispersed groups of people with a common interest use the systemto share ideas and lessons learned and create active ‘communities of practice’.

The Toolkit explains all the learning processes, and it should be enough to startan effective programme. But running learning exercises is a skill in itself. Theycan benefit greatly from wider knowledge of learning processes, and frompersonal skills such as workshop facilitation and interviewing. Further readingand coaching or help from skilled consultants can often be worthwhile,especially when starting a learning programme for the first time.

As BP’s experience shows, the rewards from a learning programme can comequickly, but they are not immediate. Learning skills take time to develop, andunless a knowledge-sharing culture already exists it is likely to take even moretime for the process to become second nature. Learning programmes alwaysrequire pump-priming investment, and they need the active backing andinvolvement of top management, perseverence, and a culture which positivelyvalues learning in order to realise their full potential. Ultimately, how much anorganisation gets from learning depends on how much everyone values it.

Learning basics

Learning Histories

The Learning History process was developed by MIT’s Center forOrganizational Learning in the late 1980s from previous research onorganisational learning, in collaboration with the Ford Motor Co,Hewlett Packard, National Semiconductor, AT&T, Federal Express andothers. The process was designed principally for use in one-offstudies of major corporate events involving hundreds of people overseveral years: the case studies which have been published in mostdetail are the development of a new model car and a majorcorporate change programme in an international oil company. TheMIT team had carried out over 15 Learning History projects by 1997,and the process is increasingly used by commercial managementconsultants.

Learning Histories probe more deeply than the AAR process and canbe a better tool for learning from very complex, multi-partycollaborations involving large numbers of people. They are normallycarried out by a team with both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ members,whose different familiarity with the company culture bringcomplementary perspectives. Information is collected mostly inindividual interviews, recorded verbatim. Interview records —supplemented by documentary information from company records— are then analysed to identify significant events during the projectunder study, issues and opportunities for improvement. The resultsare documented in a specially-designed, two column format,juxtaposing telling quotations from interviewees and the LearningHistorian’s commentary. Results are disseminated throughworkshops where this ‘Learning History’ is discussed by key membersof its target audience, and by circulating it more widely. Inevitably,Learning History exercises can be expensive — MIT have found thata large corporate-wide project can involve 150 interviews, take 30-60 person-days to conduct them, distill them and present the resultsin a Learning History report and workshops, and cost up to $500,000— but the process can also be used on a much smaller scale,involving 2 or 3 days of interviews and a relatively short report.

Key references:Learning Histories: A new tool for turning organisational experienceinto action by Art Kleiner and George Roth — a pre-publicationversion of an article for Harvard Business Review which explains thephilosophy, the history and the processCar Launch: the human side of managing change by George Roth andArt Kleiner — a detailed case history, with a ‘how to’ guide in theback

Full bibliographic details of all key references are given in FurtherReading, page 16.

Learning from Experience Learning basics


Principles

AARs, Learning Histories and the techniques in this manual provide frameworksfor reflective review of recent events and sharing of the knowledge gained.There are five basic steps in every every learning review:

• plan• gather information — from review workshops, interviews, project

records and other sources• create knowledge — by reflection, discussion and analysis, during a

review workshop or as a separate process• share knowledge — to a limited circle during a review workshop, to others

through knowledge-sharing workshops, and to others again in reports• apply knowledge.

A learning programme can be:

• a one-off (or occasional) review, typically looking at a very big project ingreat depth (as MIT’s own Learning Histories have usually done)

• a finite series of reviews• a routine part of management (as they are in the US Army and BP), or• any combination.

Individual learning reviews can vary in scale from a one-hour meeting ofhalf a dozen key people — which combines information collection,knowledge creation and knowledge sharing in one event — to a studyextending over several months carried out by a full-time learning team,interviewing dozens of people, writing a book-sized report, and holdinga series of dissemination workshops to share the lessons learned withhundreds of staff. But a review that large would be exceptional: atypical learning exercise involves a day or so’s preparation, a half dayworkshop, and another couple of days analysis and reporting.

Learning reviews can be held:

• before projects start, to ensure that planning makes best use ofexperience gained in previous projects — Foresight reviews

• while projects are underway, typically on completion of significant steps— Insight reviews

• after projects have finished — Hindsight reviews.

Whichever and however the tools are used, one factor is crucial. Effectivelearning requires a willingness to share experience and ideas freely across alllevels and between all participants in the process, however embarrassing.

Learning exercises assess projects, not people — and participants mustbelieve that. When relationships are difficult, information can be collected inindividual interviews and sources identified only by function, but that is alast resort. An outstanding characteristic of the most successful learningorganisations, such as the US Army and BP, is their culture of mutual trust.Sometimes this was pre-existing, and sometimes it has been consciouslyengineered to facilitate learning. It is always reinforced by making learningbring personal as well as corporate benefits. This is one part of the processwhich cannot be delegated: a culture of trust must start at the top.

The After Action Review

The After Action Review process has its roots in US Army experimentswith systematic learning in the early 1970s. By the mid 1980s AARshad become a standard feature of Army training at at all levels fromthe platoon upwards, and the Centre for Army Lessons Learned hadbeen established to disseminate the lessons learned throughout theArmy. In the following decade, it was recognised that the value of theAAR process extended far beyond training. The habit of conductingAARs after significant events spread into all levels of Armymanagement, and ‘before action’ reviews began. Former Chief of StaffGordon Sullivan called the AAR “the key to turning the corner andinstitutionalising organisational learning”. His book Hope is not amethod — what business leaders can learn from America’s Armybecame a best seller, and in the past five years the process has beentaken up widely in American industry and, in this country, by BPAmoco and the BP-Bovis Alliance.

The AAR is an ‘all-in-one’ approach designed to support quicklearning by project participants. Most AARs are based on meeting ofparticipants — from the most junior to the most senior — asimmediately as possible after event. A leader guides discussionthrough review of what actually happened (as seen from the diverseperspectives of the various participants) to establish ‘ground truth’and into comparison with doctrine, procedures and objectives, to leadto insights into how things could have been done better. Reviews ofthe largest events — such as the actions in Kosovo — are moreformal, with extensive preparation and fewer of the participantsinvolved.

Key references:A Leader’s Guide to After Action Reviews — the US Army trainingmanualHope is not a Method: what business leaders can learn from America’sArmy by Gordon Sullivan and Michael Harper — the AAR discussedas part of the US Army’s post-Vietnam and post-cold war changeprogrammes

Gatherinformation

Planlearning

Applyknowledge

Createknowledge

Shareknowledge

PROJECTS

The learning review cycle

Learning from Experience Learning basics


Planning a learning programme

Making the business caseThe evidence from organisations like BP is strongly persuasive that a systematicapproach to learning from experience pays off handsomely. But if it is notpersuasive enough, a more calculated approach can help make the case for alearning programme. A simple audit using the questions in box 1 can revealspecific areas of weakness in learning, and quantifying potential benefits,however roughly, can help in deciding how much it is worth investing in aprogramme, and what to focus on. Quantifiable benefits include:

• change value: how much would a 10% reduction in man hours, buildtime, defects or construction waste save in project cost? BP often startswith an apparently arbitrary target like this — and it is often beaten.

• opportunity value: how much would a lower cost base, morepredictable build times or lower defect rates be worth in extra business?What would it be worth to have staff gain expertise twice as fast?

• avoided cost: how much would it cost to hire and train replacementsfor staff whose tacit knowledge you rely on?

• avoided liability: how much would it be worth to reduce the chance ofoverlooking an avoidable risk by 50%?

However, it is always difficult to hard to estimate business benefit, and with littleup-front investment needed it is rarely worth the effort. With such a strongqualitative case for systematic learning it is better just to make a leap of faith.

Making it happen: learning as a projectOnce they discover the value of a systematic approach to learning mostorganisations make it a routine part of management. When reviews becomeroutine all but the largest can be financed within normal project budgets andleft to local managers to carry through. But setting up a successful programmerequires a pump-priming investment in staff time and other resources: it needsto be treated as a project in its own right, with a dedicated team, clear objectivesand a budget proportionate to its expected value. BP spent $12 million pilotingits Virtual Team Network — and estimates it produced $30 million value in itsfirst year. In a small company, the team might only be one senior managerworking on the learning project a couple of hours a week for six months, helpedby a mid-career professional one day a week. Most will be in between.

To implement an ongoing programme, the Learning Team need to:

• create a framework to kick start, guide and give continuing support tolearning reviews

• launch the programme• assist and observe the first few reviews in representative projects• monitor and publicise corporate and individual benefits to build belief

in the value of the programme and a feeling of ownership of it.

Creating a programme frameworkThe details of a programme will depend on the corporate context, but allLearning Teams need to address the same core set of issues:

• scale: should there to be learning reviews in every project, or only insome? Frequent reviews can help build a learning culture, but whenprojects are small they may generate too little new knowledge tosustain interest, making reviews degenerate into sterile ritual.

Box 1: Is yours already a Learning Organisation?

BP and Bovis Lend Lease are ‘learning organisations’ : theyunderstand how learning can lead to business advantage, and howto make it happen. Does yours? Answering five simple ‘litmus test’questions will tell you, and help identify its strengths and weaknesses:

• Does the organisation have a defined learningagenda? Learning organisations understand what kinds ofinformation and knowledge contribute to their business success— on customers, competitors, technologies or productionprocesses, for example — and they have a clear picture of whatthey need to learn and how best to learn it. A learning agendatypically includes a structured approach to learning fromexperience, together with a mixture of other tools such as marketsurveys, external courses and benchmarking exercises.

• Is the organisation open to challenging ideas? Changeand improvement are extremely difficult in an organisationwhich shoots the messenger who brings bad news. When thereare topics which are off limits for discussion messages from thegrass roots get filtered and watered down and it becomesimpossible for senior management to learn — and they are theonly people with the authority to drive radical change.

• Does the organisation avoid repeated mistakes?Repeating mistakes — often because causes are concealed,knowing that they will be punished instead of seen asopportunities for learning — is a key symptom of failure to learnfrom experience.

• Does the organisation lose critical skills when keypeople leave? It is commonplace for organisations to findthat the loss of a key person has an unexpectedly large effect oncapability — quality or customer relations suffer, or a formerlyroutine task becomes nearly impossible. This is a sign thatcrucial knowledge was tacit, locked in the head of a singleperson. Learning organisations avoid this by recognising,codifying and sharing essential knowledge, building it intovalues, norms and operating practices, and making it commonproperty.

• Does the organisation act on what it knows? It is notenough for knowledge to exist: it has to be used to createbusiness value. To do this, it has to be shared, and everyone hasto understand what it can do for the business.

Key reference:Learning in action: a guide to putting the Learing Organisation to workby David Garvin — an accessible introduction to the principles andpractice of learning in organisations, illustrated with case studiesfrom a variety of leading American companies.

Learning from Experience Planning a learning programme


• timing: should there be Foresight, Insight or Hindsight reviews, or acombination? Hindsight reviews based on workshops can give immediateresults because they combine elements of information gathering,anslysis and knowledge sharing in one process. Foresight and Insightreviews become increasingly valuable with the size and complexity ofprojects, and as information accumulates from previous learning.

• flexibility: should similar techniques be used in all reviews, or should reviewleaders be free to choose according to the nature and size of the project?

• information gathering: what information gathering techniques shouldbe used — workshops, interviews or a combination? How much effortshould be put into reviewing project records?

• knowledge creation: how should usable knowledge be developed —during workshops, or in a separate process of analysis and discusssion?

• knowledge sharing: how widely should knowledge be shared, and bywhat means — just within the project team during workshops, to awider audience (such as teams working on similar projects) in disseminationworkshops, in written reports, or how? Should it be left to review leadersto choose what to disseminate and how, and to write any reports, orshould it (at least in part) be done centrally, for example by library staff?

• review leaders: should learning reviews be led by project staff alone,by independent people from other projects or from personnel orknowledge management teams, by external consultants, or by mixedteams? Mixed teams are perhaps ideal. Project staff have valuable insideknowledge, but it is difficult for them to step outside their normal rolesand give the detached leadership needed for effective learning. And fewhave the interviewing, workshop leading (‘facilitation’), knowledgecreation and report writing skills which are crucial to successful reviews.Detachment and specialist skills can add much value, and it is false economyto make do with staff who are too involved or lack appropriate skills.

• training: if project staff are to lead reviews they will need training.Should training be based on a short taught course, a self-teaching package,or mentoring? Should training materials be produced by internal staff orconsultants? Note that when the programme matures, observingworkshops and interviews can become a valuable part of training.

• staffing: if independent in-house staff are to lead, should they be projectstaff on secondment or others, such as human resources or knowledgemanagement staff? Project staff can lead from a position of greaterunderstanding, but HR or KM staff are more likely to see the skills requiredas relevant to their professional interests.

• participation: should reviews involve only in-house staff, or businesspartners, contractors and clients too? Reviews can be much moreproductive when all parties participate, but geographic dispersal, competinginterests and relationship difficulties may make workshops impracticable.Appropriate provision in contracts and partnering agreements can help.

• resources: should routine reviews be resourced from project budgetsor separately, and how should resources be controlled? Learningprogrammes more than pay for themselves overall, but more benefitsmay accrue to following projects than to the project being reviewed. Itis vital to avoid disincentives to learning.

• incentives: what incentives should be used to encourage staff andproject partners to make the most of learning? In some contexts, forexample, challenging improvement targets and incentives based onbenefit-sharing can make a big difference to the value generated. In others,it will be enough to make learning activity a factor in performance appraisal.

Box 2: What Amicus, Buro Happold, the BP-Bovis Lend

Lease Global Alliance and Lattice Property are doing

Amicus and their partner housing associations in the AmphionConsortium have made Hindsight reviews based on workshops a keyproject milestone in all their development projects. Amphion staff,external consultants, contractors and key suppliers all participate inthe workshops.

Buro Happold have started a programme of Hindsight reviews,based on interviews with practice staff. Results are being analysedand documented in ‘Learning History’ format and circulated topartners. At the moment they are considered too sensitive to sharemore widely, but summary results will form part of the practice’s newproject database, alongside factual information, where they will beavailable to all staff through an intranet. Buro Happold have alsocommissioned an independent consultant to interview clients.

The BP-Bovis Lend Lease Global Alliance see Foresight reviewsand worldwide knowledge sharing as keys to their ability to drivedown costs and improve quality year after year. Their reviews involvea series of workshops, starting with a session in which the teamreviews information from past projects and develops criteria forevaluating proposals for change, and progressing through sessionsdevoted to clarifying functional requirements and brainstormingalternative solutions to a final session at which proposals arepresented and evaluated. The Alliance’s whole culture is designed toencourage learning from experience and knowledge sharing, withboth corporate and individual remuneration linked to internationalperformance against targets measured on a balanced scorecard.

Lattice Property have started to use Hindsight reviews based onworkshops. They are developing a new Knowledge Managementsystem, and investigating ways to link the two initiatives together.

There is more information about these and other learningprogrammes in the Case Studies.

BAA



The framework for an ongoing learning programme should include:

• staff or consultant appointments, if review teams are to includeindependent members

• a training programme for in-house team and workshop leaders, includingteaching and/or self-learning materials and/or consultant appointments

• a Learning Manual for project managers, explaining how learningreviews are to be carrried out, when and by whom

• a Review Leader’s Manual explaining how to lead review anddissemination workshops, conduct interviews, use project records, createknowledge from information collected, and write and disseminatereports on lessons learned

• an incentive regime, including specimen clauses for partneringagreements and contracts where appropriate.

The framework for a finite programme can be simpler. The main differencesare that:

• the programme should normally be planned and carried through by asingle Learning Team

• the balance of advantage tips further towards using consultants becausetraining internal staff is likely to be a disproportionate overhead,inexperienced staff would inevitably be less effective even with training, andwith consultants Learning or Review Leader’s manuals become superfluous.

• it is more important to choose projects for review which maximiseopportunities for useful learning. Pointers include the likelihood ofsimilar work being commercially important in the future, above averagecompetitive pressure, project size or complexity, and a history of problemsor exceptional success. Success and failure are equally good teachers.

• it is more important to document the lessons learned and disseminatethem effectively — there will be fewer opportunities to re-learn them later.

Launching a Learning ProgrammeLearning programmes can meet resistance (see Box 1), and it is important tolaunch them with reviews which motivate everyone by generating visiblyvaluable lessons and showing the way to clear personal and business benefits.The projects for review should be selected with care. Even if external consultantsare not used in formal training or later reviews, it can be well worth employingthem alongside the in-house staff in the pilots to ensure that they areconducted as well as possible, set a good example, and have the best possiblechances of success. It also gives the in-house team useful informal training.

Top management needs to give the programme strong and visible endorse-ment (as BP’s CEO does) and set the tone for the whole process. They shouldappear at launch events and in programme publicity, and take part as ordinaryparticipants in pilot reviews, contributing on the same terms as everyone else.

As a separate process from the normal documentation of lessons learnt, it canbe helpful to write short case studies on the most fruitful pilots for the housenews-letter or intranet to give staff who were not involved an insight into howreviews work and show them the benefits. Pilot reviews can be video tapedand discussions documented verbatim to use in future training. Hindsightreviews should be held on the pilots themselves so that lessons can belearned to improve planning and technique.

Box 1: Obstacles

Learning exercises can encounter resistance when they are firstintroduced. Some people still see hoarded knowledge as a source ofpersonal power, fear they will lose recognition when achievement iscredited to teams as much as to individuals, fear loss of status foradmitting to mistakes, feel they have no incentive or time to shareknowledge, identify only with their own specialism’s goals and ignorethe wider business picture, and simply suffer from the ‘not inventedhere’ syndrome. Attitudes like these have to be broken down andreplaced by a wider vision, trust, generosity, openness and a habit ofreflection for learning programmes to work at their best. Learningprogrammes alone cannot do this, but provided they are reinforcedby incentive structures which relate rewards to team achievementthey can help by:

• providing visible evidence that learning pays dividends, forindividuals as well as the company

• putting people in workshop environments where senior peopleshare their knowledge on the same basis as everybody else.

Well-led learning workshops can work in much the same way as theleadership courses which aim to develop habits of trust and activeco-operation through role-playing and physical challenge.

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IntroductionAll Insight and Hindsight reviews start with information gathering. To learnfrom experience, we first have to understand what our experience was — toestablish what the US Army calls ‘ground truth’. Ground truth has two parts:objective facts which provide a common point of reference, and the subjectiveexperience of individual participants — their understanding and thinkingduring the events under review — which often differs widely from personto person. It is the juxtaposition, comparison and analysis of these varioustruths which creates new knowledge. The objective facts (so far as theyexist) usually have to be gathered from project records, interpreted with duecaution; construction projects rarely have US Army luxuries likeindependent observers and video tape. Subjective truth can only begathered from reflective dialogue in workshops or individual interviews.

Workshops can be used for information gathering alone, or for knowledgecreation and knowledge sharing as well. Interviews are mainly for informationcollection. They follow similar lines to workshops, but they can probe moredeeply. Project participants can reveal much more in an hour-long interviewthan in a three hour workshop shared with a dozen others, they are less likely tobe diverted from lines of thought, and as the undivided focus of attention theycan be prompted more thoughtfully. They may also be less inhibited — butthey will not have their thoughts sparked by other participants’ contributions.

MIT have found that it is helpful for interviewers to work in pairs, with aninternal interviewer able to recognise and ferret out critical details and anexternal interviewer free to ask naive questions and raise ‘undiscussable’issues that the insider might avoid; this also eases the note-taking load andgives interviewers more time to think. Interviews are generally a morepowerful technique than workshops for information gathering, but in practiceimmediacy often makes all-in-one workshops a better choice, especiallywhen reviews are held frequently; if necessary, they can be supplementedwith selected interviews. Neither workshops nor interviews have a clearcost advantage. Box 2 shows some of the factors which can help choose.

The guidelines in this section focus on workshops, but the basic principlesof planning, preparation and conduct apply equally (with obviousexceptions) to interviews.

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• review workshop• interviews• project records• previous review reports

• review workshop• learning team analysis

• review workshop• dissemination workshops• written report

Learning techniques

Workshops and interviews

Box 2: Workshop or interviews?

Look at each pair of statements below in turn and mark the one which more accurately describes your situation:

A This review is a one-off learning opportunity B Reviews are routine in all projectsA It would be difficult to get the project team together for a workshop B It would be easy to get the project team together for a workshopA More than twenty people/groups played distinct roles in the project B Fewer than twenty people/groups played distinct roles in the projectA The significant people/groups involved in the project do not all trust each other B The significant people/groups involved in the project all trust each otherA The significant people/groups have comparable backgrounds and status B The significant people/groups all have very different backgrounds or statusA The project was technically or managerially complex B The proejct was technically and managerially straightforwardA Learning from this project has large potential business benefits B Learning from this project has relatively small potential business benefitsA There is no particular time pressure B The review needs to be completed quickly

The number of As suggests which tools are likely to be more appropriate:

6 or more As: Individual interviews 4 or 5 As: A mixture of individual interviews and workshops 3 or fewer As: Workshops

Learning from Experience Workshops and interviews


Planning considerationsInsight and Hindsight reviews should be held as soon as possible after theevents under review, before memories and interest fade and (for Hindsightreviews) before the project team has dispersed to other work. Foresightreviews should be normally held before any decisions are made on a projectwhich could foreclose options.

Routine workshops can be scheduled in to the project plan. Others may need alead time of 2-4 weeks. To be productive, all workshops need carefulpreparation, typically taking between 2 hours and 2 days depending on theformality and depth of the review. The workshops themselves can take aslittle as an hour for a routine Insight workshop, or as much as a couple of daysfor a Hindsight workshop at the end of a large project; 2-3 hours was typicalin our pilot trials. Follow-up can take anything from 2 hours to a month (elapsedtime), depending on the lessons learned and the dissemination methods used.Overall, a review leader and supporting staff are likely to spend between 1 and10 person-days on a workshop, spread over 1 to 4 weeks; 3 days is typical. In-depth, interview-based reviews take more of the review team’s time, but lessof other participants’.

A workshop can be run by one person, but all but the shortest and least formalbenefit from having two: a workshop leader (to steer the discussion) and arecorder (to take notes, control audio or video recorders, and managehousekeeping issues). As in interviews, it is helpful to have an external as well asan internal leader; they may be able to share the recording task between them.

Normally, only people actually involved in a project should participate inHindsight and Insight workshops. Outsiders such as senior managersunconnected with the project tend to inhibit discussion and should normallybe excluded. Exceptionally, key members of a team working on a similar projectmay be present as listeners. Unless the workshop has a consciously narrowfocus (to address a local problem, for example) every significant group involvedin the project should be represented — client, designers, consultants,contractors and subcontractors — and at all levels. The more participants thatare present, the richer and more complete a picture of ground truth can beconstructed. However, it becomes increasingly difficult to lead and recordworkshops as numbers rise above 10, and 20 is a practical limit for a single event.If that precludes adequately wide representation, hold two or more workshops.

Foresight workshops need a different mix of participants, selected for theirprior experience and knowledge. It is usually only appropriate to involve in-house staff and people from partner organisations who share the samebusiness objectives.

Preparing for a workshopInsight and Hindsight reviews both involve the same basic steps, but thedetails can vary widely depending on whether they are routine or one-offs,the degree of formality and depth, the number of participants, and theirfamiliarity with the process. The basic steps are:

• appoint a workshop leader and a recorder. Ideally, leaders should beindependent from the project under review (it is difficult to be detachedabout your own work), familiar with the project and its business context,and experienced in leading workshops. If necessary, give leaders

Box 1: Points to consider

• Set aside adequate time for both workshops and interviews.The US Army has found that if time is short, discussion can failto get below surface ‘measurables’ and into the ‘unmeasurables’where the most valuable learning takes place. People may bereluctant to programme in workshops or interviews, butexperience in our pilot trials shows that once the process startsmost are eager to talk.

• Avoid simplistic assumptions about who knows what: the key tounderstanding can be held by someone entirely unexpected,and the only way to ensure it is found is to involve everyonepossible in the learning process.

• Senior management can gain enormously from exposure to theraw truth that is usually missing from conventionalmanagement meetings and reports.

• Junior staff can gain too, both from being heard and fromhearing their seniors in frank discussion.

• Successes and failures can be equally valuable learningopportunities.

• It is the unexpected results from reviews which are often themost valuable.

The pilot trials

The pilot trials of the Learning Toolkit — described in the casestudies — tested a variety of options, in a wide variety of contexts:

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training, or commission external consultants and arrange for them tofamiliarise themselves with the project.

• decide who should to invite to participate• brief any participants unfamiliar with review workshops on what workshops

aim to do and how they work, including the ‘rules of procedure’• arrange a time and venue which suits as many of the key participants as

possible. If it is impossible to get all the key people together, considerinterviewing those who cannot attend, preferably before the workshopso that the leader can inject their viewpoint into the discusssion

• arrange necessary facilities, such as audio recording, flip charts and catering• collect factual material on project objectives and history to date, and

calculate KPIs if appropriate• establish the theme, focus and aims for the workshop. This will involve

reviewing project records to identify critical issues such as notable cost ortime over-runs and staffing, supply or technical problems, and mayinvolve contacting key people to help identify significant events andissues. KPIs can be helpful here.

• develop a plan for the discussion based on chronology and/or notableevents, and summarise them on slides or flip charts as a visible reference.

Insight and HindsightReview workshops are quite different from conventional projectmanagement meetings or project reviews (Box 2). Unless everyone isalready familiar with them, the workshop leader should start by remindingparticipants of their purpose, structure and rules of procedure (Box 3). It isimportant that participants should understand that:

• a review workshop is a candid, non-judgemental discussion of what wentwell and what went less well in the project, intended to help everyonepresent — and other colleagues — do better in the future. Contributionswill not be individually attributed in any report, and nothing anybodysays will be held against them in the future.

• everybody’s contribution is equally welcome and potentially valuable;everybody is encouraged to contribute, but nobody is obliged to do so

• contributions should focus on personal knowledge. Objective facts,personal perceptions of events (even if subsequently found to be wrong)and the thinking behind decisions are all equally important. Nobodyshould speak on another’s behalf, and speculation about other people’sperceptions should be avoided.

• it is normal for people’s views of events to differ: the differences oftenreveal where performance could be improved. There should be noattempt to find out ‘who was right’: normally, all views were legitimate inthe context of their place and time.

• criticism must be avoided; equally, everyone should wear a ‘tough skin’ andavoid interpreting perspectives which conflict with their own as criticism.

This should only be a reminder, repeating information sent out with invitations:it should not be relied on as the only way of familiarising participants withthe rules of the game.

The main business of Insight and Hindsight workshops is to discuss threequestions in turn: What happened? Why did it happen? How can we dobetter? The US Army has found that it is best to devote about a quarter ofthe time to the first question, a quarter to the second, and half to the third.

Box 2: Review workshops aren’t management meetings

Review workshops:

• take place ‘offline’ to encourage reflective discussion, inprotected space and time free from interruptions

• take no decisions, give no instructions

• focus first on understanding the past, and only then on thefuture

• focus on significant events and issues — routine progress isignored

• have no hierarchy: all participants are equal

• are ego-free zones: they are about truth as participants see it,not about making a good impression

• there is no criticism, no blame

Box 2: Workshop Rules of Procedure

• Nobody is required to speak, but everyone is stronglyencouraged to do so

• All participants have equal status during the workshop

• Everybody speaks only about their personal experience in theinformation gathering phase

• Everyone recognises that subjective truth can differ from personto person

• Nobody criticises anyone else — the focus is on past truth andfuture improvement

• Management guarantees no recriminations

Insight and Hindsight workshops: focus and timing

1 What happened? 25%

2 Why did it happen? 25%

3 How can we do better? 50%



Discussion can be structured in several ways, such as:

• chronologically through the project• around measurable aspects of performance, such as KPIs• around significant events and issues identified before the workshop.

When preparation is thorough and discusssion time limited, immediate focuson significant events and issues can be the most productive approach.However, this does risk missing important points which might have emergedin a more open-ended dialogue: there is a limit to how thoroughpreparation can be without reducing the workshop to a mere addendum toprevious interviews. When time allows it is better to start with discussionstructured chronologically or around performance metrics, and introducesignificant issues identified previously only if they fail to emergespontaneously. A chronological structure is probably easiest to lead, and forparticipants to adhere to. But the structure should never be too rigid: like allresearch managers, workshop leaders should remain open-minded and beprepared to respond flexibly as findings emerge.

What happened?The first part of the discussion provides the raw materials for the laterdialogue in the workshop.

The first objective is to establish ground truth — what was supposed to happen,and what did happen — and to identify ‘significant issues’ and ‘significantevents’ which appear to merit more detailed review. These are areas wherethe project has failed to meet (or has exceeded) its objectives, or performancehas fallen short (or excelled) in some other way — budget variances, timevariances, re-work, accidents, defects, relations within the construction teamor between the team and client, unreasonable pressures on staff — or wherean improvement in an already good performance appears possible.

The second objective is to give participants a clear, shared view of theinteraction of people and events in critical parts of the project, and greatermutual understanding.

Facts from the project record should be used to provide the organisingthread either of chronology, performance metrics or significant issuesidentified previously, and related objectives. The workshop leader shouldguide discussion along this thread, and invite participants to describe theirperception of events at each ‘stopping point’, explaining the considerationswhich influenced their actions.

As the dialogue develops, one person’s memories will trigger others to offercontrasting perspectives and a rich, 360o view of subjective and objectiveevents will develop. It can be helpful to record the highlights on awhiteboard, or sticky notes arranged alongside a basic time-line or list ofmetrics, to help participants keep everyone’s perspective in mind. As far aspossible, discussion should focus on specifics such as identifiable events andquantifiable performance standards: for example, ‘quality’ is too vague andcomplex to focus constructive dialogue: ‘number of defects in steelwork’ or‘documented customer complaints’ is much better. Throughout, theworkshop leader should be alert to the developing picture and promptparticipants for missing details.

Amicus Group pilot trial — Hoystings Close,CanterburySalient features:• Amicus were acting as developers at Hoystings Close

• housing development

• difficult project history

• Hindsight review, based on a workshop

• client, contractor, project management consultant andlegal adviser all participated

• followed Learning Manual techniques closely

• review process since adopted as recommendedpractice in Amicus and 16 other housing associations.

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Buro Happold pilot trial — DarwinCentre, Natural History MuseumSalient features:• Buro Happold were structure, fire and services

engineers for the Darwin Centre

• new museum building

• technically challenging (houses 22 million specimensin 450,000 glass jars of inflammable alcohol)

• Hindsight review, using interviews

• only Buro Happold staff participated

• documented in Learning History format


• six more reviews carried out since pilot.

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Why did it happen?The objective in the second part of the workshop is to discover why significantevents happened as they did — why problems arose, why objectives weremissed, how successes happened, what was critical to them. This involvestracing underperformance to specific factors such as lack of information,inadequate preparation, misunderstanding, late deliveries, defects in bought-in components, staff absence, unrealistic scheduling, theft, errors of judgementand unpredictable externalities. And, equally, it means spotting opportunities toimprove on good performance in things like unnecessarily large contingencies,sequential work which could be carried out in parallel, and underemployedstaff who could take on extra tasks. In the process, people discover what theydid right and what they did wrong, and — most important — how theirinteractions as a team led to good or bad consequences.

How can we do better?This part of the workshop is where lessons are learned. The dialogue shouldbuild on the results from the preceding discussions to identify whereimprovement can be made, and if possible suggest how. The aim is not towork out the detail of new ways of working but to provide a clear basis forworking them out after the workshop, in the course of routine mangementor in follow-up studies. For example, lack of information and misunderstandingscan be cured by more site investigation and better communication, latedeliveries by earlier ordering or more tightly-defined supply contracts, errorsof judgement by better training.

ClosureThe leader should close the workshop with thanks to the participants and abrief summary of what significant events and issues have been identifiedand what ways have been found to improve performance in future, andexplain how the workshop will be followed up — for example, by furtherinvestigation of significant events and wider dissemination of lessons learned.

Leader skillsIt is not easy to lead a review workshop well. Like riding a bicycle, the principlesare easy to understand, but it takes time for the practice to become automatic.

Workshop leaders should steer the dialogue with a light touch, interveningonly to the extent needed to keep the focus on salient issues and on clearlyidentifying lessons for the future. This can be done by summarising atfrequent intervals and by posing open-ended and leading questions, eitherto individual participants or to the whole group. Neutral questions like ‘howcould we have done . . . better?’ should always be used, and loaded questionslike ‘wouldn’t it have been better to . . .?’ avoided.

It is important to keep the focus clearly on learning from actual experience inthe project, and not let discussion drift into general issues, such as managementstyle or company structure. It is important, too, to avoid jumping toconclusions, and to ensure that conclusions are supported by as muchfactual evidence as possible; sometimes, it will be appropriate to seek furtherevidence from project records or interviews after the workshop. Discussionof notable successes can be worthwhile if lessons can be learned from themto improve performance in other projects, but it is generally more productiveto focus on performance shortcomings, and on areas where there appear tobe opportunities to improve performance which is already good.

Box 1: Leader responsibilities

• Introduce the topic

• Move the dialogue from each question to the next

• Keep dialogue focused on important issues

• Pace the dialogue to stay on schedule

• Listen

• Encourage

• Prompt

• Summarise

• Enforce the Rules of Procedure

• Set the tone

SecondSite Property pilot trial — formergasworks, PortsmouthSalient features:• SecondSite Property was the client

• site remediation

• technically novel — used bio-remediation

• Hindsight review, based on a workshop

• client, contractor and specialist consultants allparticipated


• review process likely to become routine for projectswith special technical or other interest.

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Inevitably, productive discussion will sometimes require focus on participants’mistakes. This should not be avoided. A good leader can guide the discussionso that it is frank without being unduly embarrasing to the person whomade the mistake. Nobody makes mistakes deliberately; they usually arisefrom lack of critical information or knowledge, undue time pressure, incorrectassessment of conflicting factors, or an unfortunate outcome from a finely-balanced decision which might equally well have led to success. The lessonsare more often for others — to allocate budgets differently, improve informationflow, put staff under less pressure or give better training, for example.

Leaders need to be conscious of how things are being said and by whom, aswell as what is being said. They should always be alert for infringements ofthe rules of procedure, and bring the discussion back on track whennecessary. They should actively encourage contributions from quietparticipants, and constrain the unproductively verbose.

Finally, it is the leader’s responsibility to ensure that as many participants aspossible leave believing that learning workshops really are opportunities forcandid discussion of experience, and that the process is capable of generatinginsights which lead to real improvements in performance. Disillusion can beinfectious, compromising the prospects for future learning exercises.Experience in trials of the Toolkit is that participants in well-run reviews arenearly always enthusiastic and want more — itself a sign of their value.

There is more advice on leading workshops in the LfE Workshop Leader’s Guide.

ForesightForesight workshops differ from Insight and Hindsight workshops in severalobvious ways, but most of the basic principles still apply.

The key questions are:

• who has done this before, is currently working on something similar, orknows something about it?

• how was it done last time, and what else do we know that is relevant?• how can we do better?

— in other words, how do we learn from past experience and not only avoidre-inventing the wheel, but make the next one better?

This changes the dynamics of the discussion. There may be two rather differentgroups of people involved: those with prior experience, and those seekingto learn from them. But the basic framework is still hindsight, focused nowby the circumstances of the new project alongside those of the old.

Where Hindsight reviews have already been done on prior projects thereview reports make a good starting point for all participants, enabling thedialogue to start from a higher base of understanding.

Workshops like this, which bring together people from different parts of anorganisation who share common interests, can be a valuable stimulus forbuilding ‘communities of practice’, networks of people who continue to shareinformation and give mutual help through the company intranet, email andoccasional meetings.

Foresight workshops: key questions

1 Who’s done this before?

2 How?

3 How can we do better?

BAA pilot trial — new check-in at GatwickSalient features:• BAA were the client for the development• new check-in facility, part newbuild, part adaptation

of existing space

• demanding timescale, completion after beingbrought into use

• Hindsight review based on interviews

• used Learning Manual techniques

• lessons learnt disseminated to other BAA staff in aknowledge-sharing workshop.

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Bovis Lend Lease have made learning and knowledge management a corebusiness philosophy and developed Foresight processes to a fine art.

Through their Global Alliance partnership with BP, they are responsible forthe management of BP’s retail capital investment programme and themaintenance of its service station network across Europe from Portugal toAustria, and in the USA. Bovis Lend Lease’s income from the partnership eachyear is linked to the Alliance’s international performance measured againstagreed benchmarks on a balanced scorecard, and personal incentives for UKemployees are linked to pan-European weighted average performance. In itsfirst two years the Alliance cut the cost of service stations by 26%, and itcontinues to drive costs down. In 2002, the UK team was set a target ofreducing total costs by a further 25%. They achieved 30%, by Foresight.

The Global Alliance approach combines value engineering and Foresighttechniques in a three-stage workshop process:

1 Review functional requirements and information on cost andperformance in previous projects, identify focus areas where thereappears to be scope for savings, and develop criteria for evaluatingsolutions. The Alliance brings information and expertise from all its teamsworldwide into the process: in 2002, for example, their eventual solutionincluded the use of a Portuguese company to supply and install thefurniture and equipment in service station shops, with extensiveprefabrication.

2 Look more closely at the functional requirements of focus areas andbrainstorm alternatives. In 2002, the Alliance team used two workshopsfor this. After the second, members of the team took on responsibility forworking up detailed solutions for their various areas of speciality basedon the ideas they liked best.

3 Review the worked-up solutions and evaluate them on the criteria setin stage 1.

By 2002 all the easy cost saving measures had already been taken, so theteam looked for radical alternatives to the implementation of whole systems,such as the electric system. The Alliance stress the importance of focusingon functionality — what the system needs to do — rather than its physicalnature as a way of detaching thinking from past solutions and enablingcreativity and radical change.

They also stress the necessity for the underlying conditions identified earlierin the Manual as vital for all learning: a culture of learning and knowledgesharing supported by visible commitment from management, appropriateincentives, and good processes. In Bovis Lend Lease, for example, theknowledge sharing processes include a Communities of Practice programmewhich pools the expertise of groups of experts in specific areas from aroundthe globe, iKnow, a database of research, written reports and knowledgenetworks across the organisation, and iKonnect, a service which usesfacilitators based in London, Sydney and New York to find answers toquestions by putting people in touch with expertise elsewhere in the company.

Bovis Lend Lease have developed a sophisticated system and invest heavilyin it, but the basic elements of their approach could be used equally well incompanies and projects of any scale.Cost savings in BP service stations 1996-98

BP-Bovis Lend Lease Global Alliance pilottrial — service station cost reductionSalient features:• the Global Alliance are responsible for building and

maintaining BP service stations worldwide under apartnering agreement

• 2002 challenge: reduce total costs by 25%

• Foresight review, based on workshops

• only Global Alliance staff participated

• used techniques the Global Alliance has developedover several years, based on BP methods

• the process is standard practice and has beenconsistently successful in enabling radicalimprovements.

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Creating knowledge

Creating knowledge is the most crucial step in learning from experience. Arecord of past events is just a history; the value comes from understandingwhat those events tell us about the way the world works and how we can actmore effectively in future. And that comes from seeing causal connections andpatterns, and linking them up with existing knowledge.

As individuals, we do this instinctively all the time — it is what happens whenlong division stops being a sequence of rote-learned steps which mysteriouslygive the answer and becomes a meaningful process, and when we realise howto tell whether it is a good time to talk to the boss. The creation of knowledge inour heads is what turns mere reading, listening or remembering into learning.For an individual, knowledge creation and learning are the same thing. Butorganisations have no instincts: their knowledge has to be created consciously.

Learning reviews create knowledge in several ways, and the learning team’s skillcan make a big difference to the number, quality and ultimate business value ofthe lessons learnt.

During review workshops, participants learn individually as they listen,contribute and think about the events being reviewed. Workshop leaders canincrease learning by doing their homework with project records, keeping thediscussion structured, focused and well paced, prompting for clarification andexplanations of underlying thinking, being alert themselves for connections andpatterns, and summarising well. Research suggests that we learn more from ourexperience if we examine not just our past actions but the subconsciousreasoning behind them — the deeply ingrained assumptions, generalisationsand habitual ways of thinking that shape our behaviour. Little of this emerges inroutine business meetings, but a skilled workshop leader can bring it out. Theleader’s final skill is to make a good record of the discussion: this is crucial tocreating additional knowledge and sharing lessons with non-participants later.

There is less opportunity for individual learning in interviews because thejuxtaposition of different people’s perceptions and interpretations of eventsis missing. The unconscious, collective knowledge of teams is often the mostvaluable of all. This means that when information for a learning review isgathered by interview most of the knowledge creation has to take placelater when the interview records are put together and analysed. Theinterviewer’s skill in preparing, focussing the dialogue, recognising key points,prompting and recording is crucial.

Post-interview analysis is essentially a process of proxy learning. The analyst’sjob is to learn all they can from the collected project and interview records,creating knowledge which can be documented and passed on to the peoplewho can use it productively. Post-workshop analysis can be valuable too: theconstraints of the workshop itself inevitably mean that some connectionsand patterns are missed at the time.

Knowledge created during workshops, interviews and post-event analysis isinitially tacit, existing only in the heads of the people involved. In most contextsit is vital to document the review process and lessons learnt and create explicitknowledge which can be shared with others and adds to the knowledge assets ofthe business. And even this is not the end of the process: business benefits onlyarise when people learn from reports. The form and quality of review reportshave a big effect on the amount people learn from them.

The ladder of inference

MIT use the concept of a ‘ladder of inference’ in their learning reviews.This was designed to show people how much understanding we canmiss when we jump straight from data to conclusions with littleintermediate thought (as we often do). An observation like ‘Tomyawned’ can lead straight to an assumption like ‘Tom is bored’ and aconclusion like ‘Tom doesn’t care about the project’ — and that caninfluence what we do in future. Perhaps Tom was just woken at 3amby a crying baby. MIT have found that keeping the ladder in mindduring reviews makes discussion more productive by encouragingpeople to remember and articulate the thoughts and feelings behindtheir actions — often crucial to understanding why things happenthe way they do. Many of the most valuable lessons in learningreviews come from recognising the importance of unspoken factorssuch as a lack of trust, conflicting goals and ‘sacred cows’ ofprocedure, and bringing them out into the open where they can beconfronted and solutions found.

Actions(based on beliefs)

Beliefs(about the world)

Conclusions

Assumptions(based on the meanings)

Meanings(cultural and personal)

Data(observations)

Experience: what we see, hearand do

Learning from Experience Creating knowledge


Sharing knowledge

Learning only turns into business benefit when the results are used to improveperformance. Sharing lessons learnt to get them into the heads of people whoare in a position to use them is as important as learning them in the first place.

The appropriate technique depends on:

• the scale of the learning exercise• the nature of the lessons• their expected business value, and• the number and location of the people who are in a position to use them.

Lessons learnt in a Hindsight or Insight workshop are automatically sharedby all the participants, and they spread as staff move on to other projects, orparticipate in Foresight events. But it is nearly always worth sharing themmore widely. This can be done through knowledge-sharing workshops wherekey results are discussed by a larger and wider audience, or through reportswhich can be circulated and remain accessible on paper or (more effectively) oncompany intranets, such as Bovis Lend Lease’s iKnow system. Reports turnthe personal knowledge gained from the learning exercise into a corporateasset which is much easier to share widely and cannot be forgotton, lost whenpeople leave the company or simply change job, or be inaccessible because theexpert is out of the country. Lessons learned from interviews can, of course, onlybe spread through knowledge-sharing workshops and reports.

MIT has found that dedicated knowledge-sharing workshops are the mosteffective way to convey lessons learned. They give participants an opportunityto engage actively with the lessons and the experience which gave rise tothem, and to make them their own in a way that reading a report on theirown or (even worse) listening passively to a presentation usually fails to do.However, they are expensive unless the target audience is relatively small andgeographically compact. They need to be backed up by at least a simplereport in a durably accessible medium (such as a company intranet), to avoidundue reliance on memory and to pass messages on to new staff.

It helps to make reports more vivid if they juxtapose lessons learnt with selectedquotations and challenging questions which encourage readers to think and tofind additional meanings of their own. Research shows that personal storiesoften transmit knowlege more effectively than dry ‘technical’ statements. Thisprinciple is the basis for the Learning History reporting format developed at MIT(and used in Buro Happold’s pilot trial), and it can be used in less formal reportsas well. Major learning exercises based on large and complex projects, like thosein MIT’s published case studies, may contain many diverse lessons for differentparts of an organisation. They can only be disseminated effectively thoughdetailed Learning Histories, supplemented by knowledge-sharing workshops forkey staff. Whatever their form, reports should always be validated by givingworkshop participants and interviewees an opportunity to comment on drafts;it can undermine their impact if word spreads that they are inaccurate.

Sometimes learning exercises suggest specific changes to formal procedures.In these cases, the first step is to convince the appropriate managers in one-to-one discussions or a small meeting, backed up by a short report whichexplains the proposed changes and shows how they are supported by theevidence. Lessons can then be embodied in new procedures, documentedand promulgated through normal management channels.

The Learning History format

The Learning History is organised in ‘chapters’recounting particular episodes, each divided into‘segments’ focussing on particular dilemmas,questions or anecdotes

The single-column prologue is based on notablefacts and events that everyone agrees happened,and explains the business significance of thesegment

In the right-hand column, verbatim quotationsfrom interviewees tell the story from their variouspoints of view, identified only by their position.Research shows that stories are a particularlypowerful medium for communicating insights andideas: the context and the personal voice (whichappear irrelevant at first glance) make them moreunderstandable, memorable and credible than de-personalised ‘bullet point’ distillations.

The left-hand column gives the learninghistorians’ commentary, insights, questions,reflections and perspective to provoke readers intodeeper thoughts

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Learning from Experience Sharing knowledge


Further reading

There is a large literature on organisational learning, from academics, consultantsand business journalists. The books, articles and web resources listed here areall highly readable, technically excellent and focussed on business realities.Start with the free web resources, and go on from there. Please note that URLsmay change — if one fails, try the site’s home page and search from there.

Free web resources

A Leader’s Guide to After Action Reviews, TC 25-20, 1993, US Army Centre for ArmyLessons Learned (CALL), http://call.army.mil/products/spc_prod/tc25-20/table.htm

Learning Histories: A new tool for turning organisational experience into action,Art Kleiner and George Roth, 1997, http://ccs.mit.edu/lh/21cwp002.html(later published in Harvard Business Review Sep-Oct 1997 as How to MakeExperience Your Company’s Best Teacher, reprint 97506)

Creating Conversations for Change: Lessons from Learning History projects,George L Roth, 1999, http://www.aom.pace.edu/odc/papers.html#1999

Learning Histories: Using documentation to assess and facilitate organisationallearning, George L Roth, MIT Sloan School of Management, http://www.solonline.org/static/research/workingpapers/18004.htmlThe Society for Organizational Learning’s website at www.solonline.comoffers a wealth of useful information

Knowing the Drill: Virtual teamwork at BP, Centre for Busines Innovation Journal,http://www.cbi.cgey.com/journal/issue1/features/knowin/index.html

Human Resources Development Council: Getting results through learning, http://www.humtech.com/opm/grtl/handbook2/toc.htm

Gurteen.com, a UK-based knowledge management consultancy’s websitewith a wide variety of useful information about KM, http://www.gurteen.com

Books

Learning in Action: a guide to putting the learning organisation to work, David AGarvin, Harvard Business School Press, 2000, ISBN 1-57851-251-4

Hope is not a Method: what business leaders can learn from America’s Army,Gordon Sullivan and Michael Harper, Broadway Books, 1997, ISBN 0-7679-0060-X

Car Launch: the human side of managing change, George Roth and Art Kleiner,Oxford University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-19-512946-6

Oil Change: perspectives on corporate transformation, Art Kleiner and GeorgeRoth, Oxford University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-19-513487-7

Journal articles

Unleashing the Power of Learning: an interview with British Petroleum’s JohnBrowne, Harvard Business Review, Sept-Oct 1997 (can be ordered in hardcopy or for download as reprint number 97507 from Harvard BusinessSchool Publishing’s web site, http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu)

Learning from Experience Further reading

Learning from the product

The Learning Toolkit focuses on learning from experience of theconstruction process. It can be just as valuable to learn from theperformance of the completed product in use — the building, roador whatever. Many construction assets underperform, unnoticed bytheir designers or builders, and innovations can also miss their targetsas far as the user is concerned. The only way to avoid this is to closethe loop with feedback.

The fragmentation of the construction industry and the temporarynature of construction teams mean make it difficult for the supplyside to undertake feedback. Clients are better placed both to do it,and they stand to reap most of the benefits. Techniques for learningfrom experience with the construction product are being developedby William Bordass Associates and tested by a number of majorconstruction clients. The results will be published as a FeedbackResource on the Usable Buildings Trust website atwww.usablebuildings.co.uk.

The Feedback project also plans to develop a database ofperformance data on real buildings results to provide a basis forbenchmarking. For further information about this, please contact BillBordass at WBA, [email protected].

The project builds on WBA’s experience in a series of feedback studieswhich has looked at the energy and environmental performance ofsome 20 buildings since 1995. The results of these Probe (Post-occupancy Review Of Building Engineering) studies are published inBuilding Services Journal; the more recent are also available atwww.usablebuildings.co.uk.

IT Construction Best Practice

The IT Construction Best Practice website at www.itcbp.org.uk offersa wide range of resources on the use of information technology andrelated issues, including the IT aspects of knowledge management.

The resources include case studies, director’s briefings, how-to guides,a database of research projects, a list of forthcoming events, and linksto journals, news and other web-based resources. At the time ofwriting material relevant to knowledge management includes detailsof 23 events and 3 current research projects, 4 white papers and projectreports, 2 case studies, links to 2 KM web sites, and 2 news items.

ITCBP also offers a weekly e-mail based information service. Thee-mails are designed to explain the opportunities and pitfalls presentedby the use of IT, the Internet and other forms of electronic communicationin construction. Each e-mail includes a c. 600-word briefing on aselected subject, together with links to relevant websites and to newsitems, current industry events and resources on ITCBP website.

http://call.army.mil/products/spc_prod/tc25-20/table.htm

http://ccs.mit.edu/lh/21cwp002.html

http://www.aom.pace.edu/odc/papers.html#1999

http://www.solonline.org/static/research/workingpapers/18004.html

http://www.solonline.org/static/research/workingpapers/18004.html

http://www.solonline.org

http://www.cbi.cgey.com/journal/issue1/features/knowin/index.html

http://www.humtech.com/opm/grtl/handbook2/toc.htm

http://www.humtech.com/opm/grtl/handbook2/toc.htm

http://www.gurteen.com

http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu

LfE: The Learning Manual - Usable Buildings...gets into the system, and ensure its integrity....

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