Lesson Learning in the Estonian, Netherlands, Portuguese, and Ukrainian Armed Forces, 2021-2025

Dyson, Tom (2026). Lesson Learning in the Estonian, Netherlands, Portuguese, and Ukrainian Armed Forces, 2021-2025. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-858262

This grant engages with conceptual, empirical and theoretical research questions about military learning processes which have the potential to substantially enhance the military effectiveness of NATO member-states in a wide-variety of operational contexts.

The capacity of militaries to quickly capture successful individual/group adaptation and mistakes by deployed soldiers/allies as organisational learning is an enduring feature of military effectiveness. Poor intra- and inter-organisational learning capability reduces the relevance of key 'institutional military' activities, such as training, doctrine, and officer education, leaving soldiers in ongoing and future operations facing an 'adaptation trap' of relearning lessons in the field. The increasingly fast-changing nature of contemporary operational environments has sharpened the negative consequences of an adaptation trap for the safety of soldiers and civilians, and for operational/strategic success.

Militaries have sought to rise to this challenge by establishing permanent 'lessons-learned' processes within service branches and the joint environment during the 2000s. Run by dedicated lessons-learned branches, they focus on improving a military's ability to identify best-practices and to uncover, resolve, and disseminate tactical- and operational-level lessons from exercises, operations, and allies.
However, the potential of lessons-learned processes to revolutionise military learning remains untapped. Technological advances in communicating, storing, and disseminating information have not been accompanied by advances in the conceptual and organisational dimensions of lessons-learned processes. Practitioner guidance provides limited advice about how militaries can ameliorate barriers to learning. Military innovation studies, management studies, and organisation studies have also failed to examine best-practice in lessons-learned processes. Hence this project makes an important contribution to understanding the potential of lessons-learned by exploring three key conceptual, empirical, and theoretical themes.

First, the lessons which can be drawn from management studies and organisation studies about best-practice in the activities which enhance the capacity of military lessons-learned processes to effectively acquire, manage, disseminate, and exploit lessons from operations, exercises, and allies ('absorptive capacity'). Second, the project will explore hitherto-unexplored case studies of small military early-adopters of lessons-learned processes: Estonia, the Netherlands, and Portugal. In doing so, it will explore the utility of best-practice gathered from the private and public sectors in a military setting and the challenges that small militaries face in running lessons-learned processes. The project will also explore the more general challenges of running lessons-learned processes in high-intensity warfare training exercises and stabilisation operations. The project will enquire whether innovative practices have emerged among smaller militaries which might enrich understanding of the fundamentals of lessons-learned best-practice, applicable to all militaries, and to other public sector organisations.

Finally, the project will illuminate the scope for practitioner agency in improving lessons-learned processes by exploring the analytical leverage of neoclassical realism in theorising military learning. It will sharpen understanding of the mutually-constitutive relationship between structural barriers to learning, including bureaucratic politics, organisational culture, and strategic culture and the emergence of activities which enhance absorptive capacity. The research questions, timetable and detailed impact plan have been developed in cooperation with practitioners. Its findings will deliver outputs of direct relevance to their work and will be integrated into the NATO Lessons-Learned Handbook and NATO procedures, policy, directives, and training.

Data description (abstract)

The grant has developed new knowledge about the barriers to learning in military organisations by uncovering the impact of the lived practices of practitioners on organisational learning in a military context. It develops a new 'practice-attentive' account of military learning which illuminates vital dynamics across three dimensions underlying organisational learning practices: (i) The structuring of resources, rules, and sanctioned interactions that shape possibilities for cooperative activities; (ii) differing temporal orientations and conflicting senses of priorities among actors; and (iii) relational patterns of communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing practices across teams, ranks, and functions. The grant finds that a practice perspective substantially advances conceptualising the 'living dynamics' underlying military learning successes and failures. It demonstrates the imperative that institutional governance mechanisms take these practice dimensions into account and discerns influence points for pragmatic intervention to improve organisational learning. The project finds that genuine organisational adaptation depends on enabling sustained collaborative questioning of perceived environmental givens across functions, ranks and time orientations through relentless examination of assumptions and reasoned challenge of constraints to learning. It therefore highlights the importance of senior leader championing of formal and informal institutional fora for structured reflection and cooperation of activities within strategic goals, such as ‘cross-functional teams’ and informal study groups/working groups established outside the military hierarchy. The grant also draws attention to the need for a focus on new research questions. In particular, to the imperative of further multi-disciplinary research into the role of promotion processes and officer education in fostering the practising of the relationships and behaviours across military organisations which enable the absorption of new knowledge. These areas are important to the success of organisational learning initiatives with armed forces, yet exploration of the fundamental features of good practice have largely been neglected by military innovation studies and scholars from management and organisation studies.

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