'Learning to Manage Lessons' UK Resilience Lessons Digest Issue 5

The Digest is part of a programme of work at the Cabinet Office Emergency Planning College (EPC) to synthesise lessons learned from all major exercises and emergencies. It has been deliberately designed to support our processes of learning lessons in three ways:

	Summarising transferable lessons and themes from a wide range of relevant sources
	Sharing lessons across responder organisations and wider resilience partners
	Coordinating knowledge to drive continual improvements in doctrine, standards, good practice, training and exercising

Issue 5: Learning to Manage Lessons

Since the last edition of the Digest, a range of publications with relevance for the resilience community have been released. These include the first report (Module 1) from the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, the final report (Phase 2) from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, and three new Emergency Preparation Response and Recovery Guidance documents from UK Government .

While inquiry reports are under review, the need to effectively learn from emergencies, exercises and wider events remains a common, cross-cutting denominator in the civil contingencies’ context. For this reason, Digest 5 has been designed to accompany the UK Lessons Management Best Practice Guidance (2024). While the guidance details how an increasingly effective lessons management processes can support learning from experience, the Digest brings evidence-based insights on where those processes can be most problematic, according to findings from recent public inquiries. In doing so it highlights areas that may require additional attention if desired changes and improvements are to be achieved in practice. Results from this fifth Digest analysis demonstrate significant, transferable value within and across varied resilience stakeholders and sectors.

Learning Analysis

Lessons Management refers to ‘a strategic, organised approach to, and oversight of, planned processes and procedures to achieve evidenced learning from experience, in a continual, consistent manner.’  In the civil contingencies’ resilience context, the purpose of learning lessons and capturing positive practices is to drive continual improvements in the way that individuals, teams, departments, organisations, and multi-agency partners anticipate, assess, prevent, prepare, respond to, and recover from emergencies.

Download UK Resilience Lessons Digest Issue 5:
‘Learning to Manage Lessons'

    
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