>I am looking for examples of organizations that have developed Best
>Practice processes to share knowledge, etc.
Many years ago in the nuclear submarine navy I experienced a double loop
learning and knowledge sharing system that was gernerations ahead of its
time. It was, and probably is, the Naval Reactors Incident Report system.
Nuclear reactors were one of the first systems to be brought under
proscess control and process management. I am talking the late 1950s and
early 1960s. We the operators had written processes for all reactor plant
evolutions. The double loop learning and knowledge sharing system went
into action whenever you recognized that an evolution occured and the
process was not followed or the process failed to produce the expected
outcome. The required action was to:
1. Correct any out of tolerance condition.
2. Investigate the situation and determine the root cause of the observed
outcome.
3. Take steps locally to prevent a reoccurance of the situation.
4. Determine whether or not other steps, not within the local circle of
influence, would prevent reoccurance.
5. Write all of the above down is a structured report and send it to
Naval Reactors at headquarters.
Every report would be read and analyzed. Those that were determined to be
of general interest would be distributed widely. Design and engineering
changes may result from this experienc. Process changes were made where
considered necessary. Basically, the experiences of a diverse distributed
group of people were collated centrally and the lessons learned were
distributed widely.
This was all done manually - it was before computers. It took a lot of
hours and boring administrative work to make it happen. Why did it
succeed? Everyone involved took the attitude that we were all learning
how to make a complex, and dangerous system work safely. We recognized
that there were many smart people involved in the program. And we wanted
to learn from other people's errors.
Looking back, a great vantage point, I think that I experienced one of the
first purposefully developed learning organizations.
--"William J. Hobler, Jr" <bhobler@worldnet.att.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>