Lessons Learned Practice in a Complex Production Environment

Lessons learned practice is a well-known method embraced by many companies to enhance continuous learning in their organizational routines and day-to-day work. The extant literature presents a mix of several lessons learned approaches from different disciplines. However, the approaches fail to address the distinct, complex settings that arise in production and operation phases. Thus, there is a need for rethinking of lessons learned practice in a complex production environments. Based on case studies in the aerospace industry, this chapter presents a new method for lessons learned practice, which includes a standard, seven-step representation format, together with guidelines, using videos as an enabling media. The seven-steps are: lesson learned statement, working context, task description, what went wrong or what went well, lesson learned, lesson learned measures, and applicability and delimitations. The method intends to capture a single learning point with specific recommendations, promoting process-based rather than a project-based learning. The chapter presents results from the validation of this new method in industrial setting. The validation shows that the method is beneficial in capturing lessons from skill-oriented activities in narrative form by visually showing and telling defects, problems, or improvements in complex products and associated actions in production or product support phases. The method supports exploration processes at the individual level with the creation of new knowledge with a richer context and so support exploitation processes and activities at the organizational level.