I don’t have a crash hot memory, like most I’d be well pressed to tell you what I had for dinner three nights ago. My short term working memory, however, after a bit of priming is pretty decent, it just awaits the right pieces of the jigsaw as a prompt to help fill in the blanks.
This got me thinking as to how lessons learnt can be sustainably captured and remain useful for 1, 10 & 100 years within an organisation. What priming and jigsaw pieces need to shown to employees (or deep learning AI applications) for this to occur? Is it as simple as issuing a lesson learnt document for toolbox 😂 I have a hunch that the best concepts for this wicked problem intersect somewhere between systems theory, social psychology and semiotics? Or as Kevin Kelly discussed in his book ‘Out of Control’ (free pdf here) what information will the hive mind relay, what will 🐝’s communicate when they dance? As we have seen recently fake News is just as good as spreading as real news.
A few simple ways I have seen make lessons learnt continue to be at the forefront of the organisations working memory, namely; Repurposing the lessons learnt content post-event investigation to:
- Integrate into risk registers, procedures and audit tools
- Event scenarios stripped of details and used as emergency/incident response scenario drills for other sites and future work
- Placing key principles and details onto items used each day by the workforce ie. Printed onto ceramic coffee cups, stubby holders etc
- Integrate into learning courses such as supervision or front line courses re improving work direction
- Have an ‘on this day’ section at team meetings to revisit events and controls to review applicability
- Share with your industry, including industry bodies to broaden the audience
- Provide privacy stripped event docs for education institutions like TAFE, university, colleges etc for use in their learning material.
- Providing stripped events as hiring material to verify competency of individuals
- Integrate into internal refresher training for investigations, risk management and event response
All of the above, whilst the message is important to focus on, relies on you as the curator of knowledge to frame what the lessons learnt was. Will you rely on fear and loss prevention to motivate individuals to integrate the lessons learnt into their day or will you use awe, wonder, suspense and curiosity to fuel the communication message and medium?
Rather than set out broad principles in which to improve your communication levels I’m going to direct you to a source which releases information each quarter and is one of the few publications I deeply look forward to receiving in my inbox.
It’s created by a small group of people from Jaxzyn whom I came across courtesy of Safety on Tap podcast. Their One Slash Four publications are beautiful, well researched and required reading for those who want to step forward to change how we communicate (message and medium) with the people in our organisations.
Please enjoy, reflect and integrate their concepts into the good work you are already doing to make it great.
Reframe my Safety Brain 