KIT - Institute of Management - Teaching - Chair of Management Accounting - Theses - Completed Theses - Organizational learning from experience: How to make lessons learned approaches more efficient by growing a ‘problemtree

Despite being aware that it is an important thing to do, many companies fail when it comes to learning from their own experience. The main rea-son for this circumstance is a lack of time and motivation. Existing solutions for this issue focus on the use of software-based tools to enable organizations to capture, store, and reuse their internal knowledge. However, success stories of companies implementing experiential learning processes are still extremely rare. The purpose of this paper is to enhance existing approaches by introducing a tool based on a company specific problem structure which we call ‘problemtree’. The ‘problemtree’ makes the capturing process more time-efficient and creates a common language to improve the reusing capabilities of the firm. We created this solution in a case study at a German premium sports car manufacturer to improve its learning capabilities. This approach is adaptable to other project environments as well as to other industries.