We often discuss with crisis team leaders the best means of ensuring post-incident reviews (PIRs) lead to measurable organisational growth. Many organisations are adept at conducting effective reviews but occasionally fall short of embedding lessons learned into everyday practice.

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To transform lessons into meaningful improvement, organisations need a structured, repeatable approach that bridges the gap between reflection and action. We recommend five steps that can be followed to achieve this.

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The first step is creating fault-free review environments that are not dominated by louder voices or hierarchy. How the PIR is structured is key to this point. We recommend allowing small group sessions to identify observations and recommendations, prior to tabling these in a whole group setting. Many organisations do this well already.

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The next item is ensuring the issues identified during the PIR are matched to meaningful actions. Not all observations from a PIR require action, but those that do should be matched to actions that will make a difference and are achievable. All actions should be assigned to an accountable person and have a delivery timeframe.

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Third, is prioritising actions based on the risk, impact and likelihood or recurrence of the issues being addressed. Prioritisation is just as important as identifying the actions in the first place. This is especially important when resources to implement actions are limited.

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Fourth is embedding actions into established continuous improvement pathways, such as risk registers, scheduled training and project groups. This step creates efficiencies and helps to ease the workload of those accountable for actions.

 

Finally, PIR actions should be revisited to close the learning cycle loop. This helps to not only identify any overlooked, underdeveloped or incomplete actions, but reinforces to all that PIRs are not administrative tasks, but strategic opportunities to strengthen performance, resilience and culture.