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to solve day-to-day problems in a public forum which often leads to the development
of guidelines and even standards for continuous process improvement within the
company. These sessions may also be “ registered ” so that they can be used for internal
benchmarking initiatives. Internal benchmarking consists of monitoring progress
against goals over time (comparing snapshots to an initial baseline) and/or comparing
the performance of one unit against another within the same company.
Learning histories ( Roth and Kleiner 2000 ) are a very useful means of capturing
tacit knowledge within group settings. They represent a retrospective history of sig-
nifi cant events that occurred in the organization ’ s recent past, as described in the voice
of the people who took part in them. Organizational history is often researched
through a series of initial individual interviews where participants are asked to remem-
ber and refl ect upon the event followed by a facilitated workshop with all participants
in order to capture that group ’ s memory.
The learning history process consists of:
1. Planning
2. Refl ective interviews
3. Distillation
4. Writing
5. Validation
6. Dissemination
Planning establishes the scope of the learning history to be captured. The scope
will be a function of the business objective that the learning history targets. Each
learning history exercise should be well founded on a problem or challenge that was
overcome by the organization. The learning history serves to describe what happened,
why it happened, how the organization reacted, and what current organizational
members should learn from this experience. The second phase, refl ective interviews,
consists of asking participants to talk about what happened from their own point of
view. By asking them about their analysis, evaluation, and the judgment they used,
insights will emerge. The capture and codifi cation of these insights will contribute to
increasing the refl ective capacity of the organization.
The fi nal phase, distillation, consists of synthesizing the information that was
gathered from the interviews into a summary format that will make it very easy for
others to access, read, and understand. The interview transcripts, along with notes
from the facilitated learning history workshop, can then be analyzed to identify
key themes and subthemes as well as specifi c quotes to be used. The key themes are