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Organizational Learning and Organizational Memory 377

creating it and to look for and reuse existing knowledge. The next step in the evolu-
tion of organizational memory is the use of a display system to focus knowledge
workers on improving shared understanding and coherence in their project meetings,
and capture the group ’ s information and knowledge in context and link it with the
project ’ s formal products in an easy and natural way.
Once a team or organization has recognized the value in its informal knowledge,
and has begun to capture and manage it appropriately, the group has the key raw
ingredients of project memory, and ultimately of organizational memory. Of course,
as the size of the organization and its memory increases, new problems of scale emerge
that are both technical and cultural in nature. The good news is that the short-term
payoffs from using display systems generally pay for the cost of implementing them,
thus easing the evolution toward a complete organizational memory system.

Organizational Learning

The key processes required to both populate an organizational memory and to retrieve
valuable knowledge for reuse from the same memory consists of the same steps as in
the KM life cycle (refer to chapter 2). The knowledge content to be processed, however,
is defi ned much more narrowly as the key successes and key failures that have a suf-
fi cient degree of generalization. If a particular innovation or failure is too specifi c, then
this content will typically reside in the group memory — either a project database or a
community of practice archive. Aggregated results from a diverse set of projects, on
the other hand, can be analyzed thematically to identify recurring themes. An orga-
nizational lesson learned or best practice is one that has broader applicability — it is
not limited to a particular context or particular event and offers reuse potential to an
organization-wide audience.
Secchi (1999) defi nes a lesson learned in the following way.

A lesson learned is knowledge or understanding gained by experience. The experience may be
positive, as in a successful test or mission, or negative, as in a mishap or failure. . . . A lesson
must be signifi cant in that it has a real or assumed impact on operations; valid in that is factually
and technically correct; and applicable in that it identifi es a specifi c design, process, or decision
that reduces or eliminates the potential for failures and mishaps, or reinforces a positive result.
( Secchi 1999 )
In general, the concept of lessons learned includes the following aspects:

• Contains knowledge gained by experience
• Can be positive or negative, and address a success or a failure