Top 10 Learning Lab Resources on Capturing Program Experience

Part of sustainable development programming and strong adaptive management involves documenting and sharing important lessons learned. Ideally, projects are designed to capture emergent lessons on an ongoing basis, but the reality is that much of the reflection and documentation happens during project close-out. Even if a formal system was never in place to capture learning over time, there are still plenty of ways to capitalize on work that has been done and make sure others benefit from it. Check out these resources, available in the Learning Library, to help you think through creative ways to capture knowledge and share it with others.

1. Tacit Knowledge Guidance
   Tacit knowledge is intuitive and personalized knowledge about how to do something, accumulated through experience. Although tacit knowledge can be challenging to identify and manage, adopting approaches that facilitate its capture and transfer can allow teams to leverage their collective experience for the benefit of other practitioners.
    
2. Big Picture Reflection
   Teams can use facilitated, constructive dialogue, on issues such as development hypotheses, game changer issues, and project themes, to improve the quality and substance of discourse or elicit suggestions for changes.
    
3. After-Action Reviews
   This leadership and knowledge sharing tool helps teams to better understand important events, activities, or programs. That knowledge, gleaned from and compiled by those closest to the review, can be used to improve results or shared with others who are planning, developing, implementing, and evaluating similar efforts. 
    
4. Focus Group Interviews
   Quick, versatile and typically inexpensive, focus group interviews can be used with a broad range of stakeholder groups in a wide variety of settings. Typically, they can offer greater descriptive depth than what is provided through surveys and a broader base of perspectives than often is obtained through individual interviews on how different stakeholders perceived program experience.
    
5. Low-Cost Video
   Using video to capture reflections, expertise, or significant events from a project’s lifespan is a highly effective way to disseminate lessons learned. As technology becomes cheaper, low-cost video options are being used more frequently to capture experience in the field.
    
6. Blogs Guidance
   Blogs are less formal than standard news articles or press releases, and like journal entries, contain personal elements, anecdotes, or opinions. They are a quick and easy way to document perspectives from a variety of sources that can then be packaged and disseminated in multiple ways.
    
7. Basics of Twitter
   While not a space for in-depth reflection and discussion, Twitter is a great tool for driving a wider audience to important content, generating awareness around particular lessons learned, or for promoting larger learning activities.
    
8. Webinar Guidance
   Use webinars as a way to bring a larger number of people together virtually to generate discussion, solicit feedback, or share lessons learned.
    
9. Best Practice for Documenting Lessons Learned
   Using an “ABC” framework, this brief factsheet provides tips from Shell Corporation on what questions to ask to generate useful feedback on lessons learned and how it can be communicated most effectively.
    
10. Synthesis Reports
    While a project is likely to produce a number of final reporting deliverables, it’s important to consider capturing both quantitative and qualitative data on project experience. A good synthesis report comprises findings from multiple sources – surveys, interviews, case studies, general industry trends, charts, etc – to paint a broad picture of both key lessons and common challenges. The findings from this synthesis report, compiled as part of the KM Impact Challenge, were used to inform a subsequent unConference, a two-day event that blended formal, pre-programmed presentations with participant-led discussion sessions.