Learning from disaster events and exercises in civil protection organizations
This report focuses on understanding how civil protection organisations learn from direct or indirect experiences (events) and planned learning processes (exercises). An implicit assumption of the authors was that civil protection organisations should be learning organisations that document and respond to operational, coordination, and planning issues if and when they are recognised.
The research had four key findings (p. 5):
- A flexible learning organisation must take strategic control of the learning process, and encourage an open, flexible and adaptive organisational culture.
- Learning (typically recommendations, past experiences, and new information) can be construed by different organisations as an outcome, or as a process.
- Knowing how to learn is strategically at least as important as knowing what to learn.
- Thinking beyond experience is particularly important in a risk environment growing in complexity and diversity, characterised by new challenges and risks.