Developing a systemic lessons learned knowledge model for organisational learning through projects

• Organisations are failing to learn from their past project experiences.
• The Swiss cheese model is successful at promoting safety and accident prevention.
• We adapt this model for organisations to learn from past project experiences.
• Our adaption is called the systemic lessons learned knowledge model or Syllk model.
• Management can see how project know-how is spread across organisational systems.

A significant challenge for government and business project organisations is to ensure that lessons are learned and that mistakes of the past are not repeated. Both knowledge and project management literature suggests that in practice lessons learned processes rarely happen, and when it does it is concerned with lessons identification rather than organisational learning. There are limited practical models for general management to use to conceptualise what organisational learning is and therefore how to enable it. However, aspects of health care, nuclear power, rail, and aviation organisations have successfully implemented organisational learning by way of the Swiss cheese model for safety and systemic failures. This paper proposes an adaptation of the Swiss cheese model to enable project organisations to conceptualise how they learn from past project experiences and distribute successful project know-how across an organisational network of elements such as individual learning, culture, social, technology, process and infrastructure.

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