Increasing the Learning Potential from Events: Case Studies

Abstract

Learning from incidents is a subject that is important to most organizations. We see the ‘learning from incidents processes’ as a set of processes from reporting an incident to verifying the effectiveness of the measures taken. This study aims to identify how learning can be more successful and more efficient, by identifying conditions that influence the learning processes. To structure these conditions a framework of the learning process consisting of five phases is used and as a starting point four initial categories of conditions were extracted from the literature. After four cases studies on how organizations learn from a specific incident, these initial categories were renamed and an extra category was added, resulting in five categories representing conditions to address to use more learning potential: people, communications, information quality, organizational aspects (culture) and formal conditions or resources.