Assessing Your Organization’s Capacity To Learn

If you can maintain and sustain your business’ ability to generate deep insights, integrate learning across groups, and disseminate and retain these lessons over time, you will evolve past your competitors.

But how effective are your teams at discovering these insights and making meaningful use of them beyond simple short-term “fixes”?

Just as all incidents are unique, so are organizations. Doing an assessment can reveal the existing sources of resilience as well as unknown sources of brittleness in your organization.

Research from the field of Resilience Engineering supports that these sources of resilience and brittleness are largely hidden from an organization’s internal view. Finding, exploring, and managing them requires expertise and skill with methods that trace, reveal, and map the cognitive processes of decision making.

An assessment project is not a “health check” for your company.

An ACL assessment is a holistic exploration of:

  • How your company learns from incidents (contrasted with how it thinks it learns)
  • What it learns from incidents (and at what levels of detail)
  • How individuals and teams meaningfully understand these insights
  • How far does the influence of incidents travel in the organization to places beyond localized “fixes” to the technology, such as hiring budgets, training, product roadmap decisions, compliance or regulatory implications, etc.
  • What challenges or difficulties are present in developing valuable understandings of these events

This process uses an iterative approach that begins with a broad look at how post-incident review data is currently captured and shared, and how information flows about the incident handling, generation of countermeasures, and institutional memory for the events. Using this as a basis, we then trace and map (both the informal and formal) analyses and sharing processes around the real effects that incidents have on the organization by doing a deep-dive into 1-3 incidents that arise during the engagement.

The result is a set of findings, opportunities, and specific recommendations for the organization to extract greater value out of the incidents that they experience. 


Scroll to Top