How Organizations Learn:
One of the Center's main objectives is to improve organizational learning within the wildland fire community. Read about organizational learning here, discover how it will add value to the wildland fire community and understand how you can become part of the solution.
A Learning Organization is skilled at continuously:
1) creating, acquiring, interpreting, transferring and retaining knowledge and
2) at purposefully modifying their behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.
(Definition by David Garvin 2000)
View the Six Critical Tasks of a Learning Organization created by Dr. Garvin.
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The Center has been working directly with one of the world's leading experts in Organizational Learning, David Garvin, Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He has worked with over fifty organizations around the world on organizational learning and strategic change. He is the author or coauthor of eight books, including the highly acclaimed Learning In Action, A Guide to Putting the Learning Organization to Work. |
THE U.S. ARMY’S AFTER ACTION REVIEWS: SEIZING THE CHANCE TO LEARN (128 Kb PDF) An Excerpt from: David A Garvin's Book, “Learning In Action, A Guide to Putting the Learning Organization to Work” (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000), 106-116. Reprinted with permission of the author.
Organizational Learning and Wildland Fires (128 Kb PDF) Recommendations to the Wildland Fire Community from David A. Garvin, August 2003 was sent to the Center shortly after our first 3-day meeting in June 2003.
Researchers from the University of Montana and the Rocky Mountain Research Station have published an annotated reading list of resources related to the human side of fire management, focused primarily on understanding organizational dynamics in wildland fire. The publication contains a very useful section on organizational learning.
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Professor Geoff Cumming and Dr Mary Omodei of the La Trobe University Bushfire CRC Safety in Decision Making and Behaviour Project visited the US Interagency Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC) in July and October of 2006 in order to gain some perspective on how to develop an Australasian center.
This report to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) Chair highlights several of the key accomplishments made by the Center for the interagency wildland fire community.
Organizational Learning Fire Survey:
The Learning Organization 2006 Survey has been finalized by the Harvard Business School and is now available with a few slight improvements. Respondents are again distinguished into the same three categories:
everyday working units,
firefighting crews, and
overhead teams. Please take 15 minutes to complete it. You will receive a report at the end of your session that scores your data.
During the summer of 2005, 196 people from the Wildland Fire Community took the initial Learning Organization Survey created by Harvard Business School in cooperation with the Lessons Learned Center.
Learning Organization 2005 Survey Report
Wildland Fire Safety Awareness Study Phase 4 - Developing a Cooperative Approach:
TriData Phase IV, "Developing a Cooperative Approach To Wildfire Protection" paper, presented to the Federal Fire and Aviation Leadership Council in Boise, ID, on January 6, 1998, by Charles Perrow, Sociologist, Ph.D., Yale University.