Not forgotten: how to ensure that lessons from training are truly learned
Learning can be achieved in different ways, from formal instruction to practical experience. For the individual, that experience and the lessons gained from it are stored in memory and incorporated into future behaviour, even if this is an unconscious process.
However, collective experience and the resulting lessons can be a different matter. The ‘corporate memory’, unless formalised, is a variable function which may rely solely on the recollection of long-serving individuals rather than a proper process... Continues below
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Above: Among other tasks, NATO’s JALLC conducts analyses and identifies lessons learned from the alliance’s major exercises. (Photo: NATO)
The danger is that this can either lead to the ‘reinvention of the wheel’ as personnel move on and new incumbents arrive and are faced with the same issues, or to the loss of valuable opportunities to improve performance by building on experience and incorporating it into future plans or procedures.
Developing a formal lessons learned process should be an important function of any major enterprise, whether a training event or real activities, so that a ‘lesson identified’ is genuinely learned and the necessary action is actually undertaken or the solution implemented.
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The author can remember from a previous existence sizeable post-exercise reports with detailed recommendations which were not always implemented, with the result that the same ‘lessons’ reoccurred, having not been ‘learned’.
The Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre (JALLC), based in Lisbon, is NATO’s lead agent in this area of activity and provides the eponymous capability for the alliance.
According to its documentation ‘although the JALLC was originally conceived to primarily analyse exercises, changes to the NATO environment and growing NATO involvement in operations resulted in the JALLC’s activities shifting to analysis of operations and major NATO Response Force exercises’.
NATO defines its lessons learned capability as providing commanders with ‘the structure, process and tools necessary to capture, analyse and take remedial action on any issue and to communicate and share results to achieve improvement’.
The purpose here is to learn efficiently from experience and to provide validated justifications for amending the existing way of doing things in order to improve performance for (subsequent) operations.
The JALLC is the lead agent for the collection and sharing of lessons and runs the centralised NATO Lessons Learned Portal (NLLP) which ‘supports warfare development and warfighting, improving NATO's ability to operate and adapt’. The NLLP is the single tool in NATO for the collection, management, tracking, monitoring, and sharing of lessons.
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The JALLC has refined the lessons learned process into two phases. The analysis phase identifies an issue or potential ‘best practice’, identifies proposals for improvement or remedial actions, makes a recommendation and identifies the authority to take it forward. The output of this phase is a lesson identified or best practice.
In the second, implementation, phase that authority reviews the lesson or best practice identified and the recommendation. An action plan is then developed which includes the required steps and milestones to be able to implement the lesson identified.
Once the lesson has been implemented and validated it is identified as a lesson learned and is the output of the implementation phase.
JALLC notes that “exercises, especially Phases IIA/IIB (crisis response planning) and Phase IIIB (Execution), are excellent venues to collect observations and to complete surveys, questionnaires, and interviews to collect the maximum amount of data possible in order to conduct analysis of a particular topic or subject area’. It aims to support five major NATO exercises per year.
It adds that the centre particularly focuses on identifying and extracting strategic-level lessons, including working with senior mentors on major exercises.
A major source of information is the NATO Joint Warfare Centre (JWC) in Stavanger, Norway, which is responsible for providing the alliance’s computer-assisted command post exercises (CPX) at operational and strategic levels.
As part of its work the JWC has developed a Joint Operational Reporting Tool (JORT) which supports the capturing of lessons identified and learned during an exercise and whether training objectives have been met.
The data is used to generate reports from JWC-supported exercises in conjunction with the training audience, and the final report is lodged with the JALLC for processing and implementation.
Above: MASS has used its experience of command and staff training support to develop a lessons learned process for the UK MoD and its agencies. (Photo: MASS)
Individual nations also have their own lessons learned frameworks. The UK, for example, has been developing its capability with the support of Cambridge-based MASS Consultants, part of the Cohort Group.
MASS, through its joint command and staff training (JCAST) contract with the UK MoD, is deeply involved in organising and supporting CPXs for the UK’s Strategic Command (StratCom) and has been for some time.
It identified that the UK’s lessons learned structure could be improved and in 2018 made an unsolicited bid to provide consultancy support to achieve this.
There are now three MASS personnel permanently assigned to the lessons learned task at UK Joint Headquarters (JHQ), plus one at the joint warfare division, one at the jHUB (StratCom’s innovation centre) and two more in the Strategy Policy and Operations division of the MoD.
During the recent pandemic MASS personnel also were embedded in the COVID response team in order to ensure that the experience was not lost.
Steve Townsend, head of the MASS training support group, told Shephard that the aim was to generate a learning culture and a process that ensured that lessons were captured and implemented. He said that the result was that lessons were now being used to inform both mission and exercise planning.
Townsend added that this capability was now being sought outside the military, noting that MASS had been awarded a contract by Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT) to develop a lessons learned and best practice process. This includes delivering search tools for EPUT’s DATIX incident reporting database.
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