Learning Lessons: Capturing and Institutionalizing Lessons from Complex Stabilization Efforts
To understand how we might better approach lessons learned, SIGAR and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) co-hosted a workshop titled “How do U.S. Government Agencies Learn from the Past in Complex Stabilization Operations?” on March 23, 2015, at USIP in Washington, DC. Participants from a range of U.S. government agencies, academia, and think tanks, as well as the United Nations and NATO, attended to share their experiences. This report distills the information shared at the workshop to address two key questions: 1) What are best practices in establishing lessons learned projects and in identifying specific lessons; and 2) Once lessons are identified, how to best translate them into recommendations aimed at institutionalizing this knowledge in agencies and organizations.
The reconstruction effort in Afghanistan has been unprecedented in many regards, including its cost, duration, complexity, insecure operating conditions, and the multi-tude of U.S. government agencies and donor nations involved in the effort. This diversity makes Afghanistan a fertile case study for extracting lessons applicable to other current and future reconstruction efforts. However, this diversity also presents a challenge in that there are a myriad of potential lessons and many of these lessons cut across the traditional institutional mandates of government agencies. While lessons learned efforts within agencies tend to prioritize identifying lessons where they have jurisdiction and avoid examining lessons that involve a “whole of government” approach, SIGAR’s Lessons Learned Program relies on its unique interagency mandate to examine and iden-tify those lessons that cut across agency lines.
Participants at the workshop identified practices that have proven useful in the past, as well as key challenges in identifying lessons and applying them to future efforts. There was agreement that no matter how difficult, it is vital we attempt to identify and learn lessons from our experiences in Afghanistan. The lessons that are emerging from these experiences have the potential to save both lives and resources in future reconstruction operations.
