Tool: LESSON
LEARNT LIBRARY

The objective of the Lessons Learned Library (L3) is to support organisations in sharing, editing, and consulting lessons within the domain of crisis management (CM) and disaster risk reduction (DRR). L3 is especially intended to share lessons across organisations, across sectors, and across countries with the final goal to improve CM and DRR in Europe by learning from each other’s experiences.

Lessons may be collected from various types of events: routine, every day operations, crisis situations, training and exercises, experiments and tests, but also from risk management studies or preventive activities. L3 offers a structured approach to develop and improve doctrines, organisations, training, equipment, leadership, personnel and facilities to achieve more effective, efficient and safe operations.

A lesson provides answers to questions such as: What was the situation? What was the impact? What went well in emergency management and is worthwhile to implement? But also: What went wrong, and which improvements are needed? To this purpose, any user can create new events and share their lessons with other emergency management communities in Europe.

Since lessons are of varying nature, a filtering mechanism allows users to quickly find relevant information about an event that took place (e.g. a Trial in the DRIVER+ project), about certain types of incidents (e.g. forest fires or bomb attacks), or about specific crisis management functions (e.g. evacuation or situation assessment).

The main functionalities of the L3 are (a) to add and edit crisis events and associated lessons from these events, and (b) to find and consult specific events or lessons. Because the aim of the L3 is to share lessons across the CM community worldwide, the user interface is in English, and lessons are expected to be in English too (although this is not enforced).

Since lessons need a context, all lessons belong to an event. Each event can contain one or more lessons, and each lesson is linked to one or more crisis management functions.

An event is described by:
A summary, including some general data such as type of event (e.g. an incident or an exercise), and its date and place. More detailed information on the incident scenario and CM operations, such as the initial incident and cascading effects, the (potential) impact, a map of the situation, involved organisations, and an overview of critical CM functions that had to be executed. Lessons that have been learned from the event.

A lesson consists of:
The applicable CM functions during the event, including a description of the perceived positive or negative experiences and their effectiveness. Solutions to improve the CM function based on experiences during the event, including a description of the expected performance improvement and an indication of the expected impact reduction.

These lessons are typically captured during the evaluation phase of an event when all required information is available.