Overseas perspectives shared online

Two international presentations featured at the Lessons Management Forum in 2019 are now available online.

The Lessons Management Forum aimed to increase awareness about identifying and implementing lessons within organisations through a robust lessons management system, inviting delegates from across sectors to share their experiences and insights to the practice.

The first international presentation, shown via teleconferencing, came from astronautical engineer and Chief Knowledge Officer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) David Oberhettinger.

Mr Oberhettinger’s presentation centred on practices that have proved effective at NASA JPL as they develop new ways to robotically explore deep space.

"With so many unknowns in space exploration, we prefer to make new mistakes, rather than repeat old mistakes," he said.  

"Our lessons learned committee has met weekly since 1984. I believe that a formal lessons learnt process is an effective counter measure against avoidable risk."

Mr Oberhettinger listed prerequisites for an effective lessons learned process and addressed some of the barriers, such as a reluctance within organisations to admit error. He closed his presentation by talking about lessons management success metrics and some of the associated complications.

Travis Dotson of the US Wildfire Lessons Learned Centre also presented at the Lessons Management Forum via teleconference, delivering his experience in effective lessons sharing processes.

He made a distinction between lessons being available to people, and lessons being actively learnt.

"We started to realise that our plan involved a lot of hope. We hope that the practitioner goes to the internet and finds the incident review database and pulls the report out and reads it and turns around and implements the lesson," Mr Dotson said.