Learning Lessons from Crises and Disasters

The Oxford English Dictionary defines learning as the acquisition of "knowledge of skill ... through study or experience or by being taught". In defining 'lesson' it distinguishes between "a thing learned" and "a thing that serves as a warning or encouragement". The concept of 'lessons learned' is widely used in disaster risk reduction, a field that offers many opportunities to learn from practical experience and theoretical study. The term has been used in a variety of different contexts, which can be given the following summary classification:-

General lessons from major events, particularly large disasters of international importance. Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf of Mexico states in August 2005, led to a significant number of studies that collected observations on how to improve resilience in the affected area (e.g. White 2007).
Specific lessons from major events, usually derived by concentrating on particular sectors or disciplines, such as the engineering response to building failure, or the response to disaster of psychologists (e.g. Schumacher et al. 2006).
Lessons obtained as a result of monitoring the practice and outcomes of drills and exercises, particularly those designed to test multi-agency response to incidents and disasters (e.g. Beedasy and Ramloll 2010; Fitzgerald et al. 2003).
Lessons derived over time from cumulative experience of particular phenomena, practices or problems, such hospital response to repeated mass-casualty events, or organising services to deal with the recurrent threat of pandemic influenza (e.g. Clancy et al. 2009).
Lessons that arise from particular situations, especially those in which actions taken could have been improved, and those in which innovations were tried for the first time, such as interventions in the Bam (Iran) earthquake of 2003 or the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, or the development of new scenarios for earthquake disaster response (e.g. Plafker and Galloway 1989).
In the operation of technological systems, especially those denoted 'high reliability systems' (such as avionics), the occurrence of technical faults and human error has been the focus of attempts to learn lessons and see that the faults or errors do not occur again. Such are the mutations in technology and its operation that there are frequent opportunities to repeat this exercise as the context of faults and errors continually mutates (Krausmann et al 2011).