What Does Your Organization Do With What Its Projects Teach It?

After more than three decades working across energy, LNG, refining, mining, infrastructure, and complex capital projects, I have come to appreciate a rather uncomfortable truth:

I have seen highly capable professionals work tirelessly to solve difficult problems, recover schedules, manage risks, and deliver remarkable outcomes. I have also seen organizations confront challenges that should have been familiar because similar issues had surfaced on previous projects.

That raises a question I believe every executive, project sponsor, and project professional should consider:

Not what does it document. Not how many lessons-learned workshops it conducts. Not how sophisticated its knowledge-management system is.

What does it do differently?

This is because experience alone does not create excellence… and documenting lessons does not necessarily mean an organization has learned.

Most project organizations have some form of lessons-learned process.

We conduct closeout reviews, capture observations, document successes and failures, and upload reports into repositories. Sometimes these activities are undertaken diligently. Other times, they become another contractual or governance requirement to satisfy.

But consider this: How often does the next project team actually retrieve those lessons before making consequential decisions?

And when they do, how often does that knowledge change anything?

A lesson about inadequate front-end definition should influence investment readiness and project sanction decisions.

A lesson about contractor underperformance should influence contracting strategy, capability assessment, and execution planning.

A lesson about poor schedule integration should change how engineering, procurement, construction, and commissioning dependencies are managed.

A lesson about outstanding leadership should influence how future teams are selected, empowered, and supported.

Otherwise, we are simply accumulating institutional memory without strengthening institutional capability.

One of the most sobering illustrations comes from NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in February 2003, which claimed seven lives.

The independent Columbia Accident Investigation Board found that the accident involved not only physical damage from insulating foam striking the orbiter’s wing, but also serious organizational and decision-making failures.

Among its findings were the normalization of technical anomalies, communication barriers, and an excessive reliance on previous successful missions as evidence that known risks were acceptable.

The investigation also identified organizational weaknesses that persisted despite lessons from the earlier Challenger disaster.

The implications reach far beyond aerospace.

Sometimes projects succeed because risks were managed exceptionally well. Sometimes they succeed despite weaknesses that remain undetected or uncorrected.

If leaders cannot distinguish between the two, they risk institutionalizing the wrong lessons.

The Columbia investigation reminds us that organizational learning must include the courage to challenge what appears to be working—not merely investigate what has already failed.

Consider a familiar situation in major project delivery.

A project encounters significant execution difficulties. The team works through the problems, delivers the facility, and documents the experience. The next project begins with a different team, under different commercial and schedule pressures.

Some experienced personnel have moved on. Others remember the lessons but assume the new circumstances are sufficiently different.

Before long, familiar problems begin to reappear.

This is a recurring organizational pattern I have observed across complex project environments, rather than an account of one specific project.

It reveals a fundamental weakness: we often rely on individual memory to perform a function that should belong to the organization.

People move. Teams dissolve. Contractors change. Executives rotate.

But organizational capability should not disappear every time the project organization changes.

That is why I believe leaders must move beyond asking, “What did we learn?”

The stronger question is:

I see a practical progression that helps explain how organizations can turn project experience into sustained value:

Each stage matters.

This is not an automatic progression. Each transition requires deliberate leadership, investment, accountability, and evidence of improvement.

An organization may have delivered 100 projects without developing the same capability as another organization that has delivered 30.

The difference may lie not in how much experience each has accumulated, but in how effectively each converts experience into better decisions and outcomes.

I would encourage executives and project sponsors to begin with five practical actions.

These actions are not glamorous. But neither is repeating an avoidable mistake that costs millions of dollars or undermines years of work.

Both questions matter equally.

Successful projects deserve rigorous examination, not simply celebration. Failed projects deserve honest investigation, not blame-seeking exercises.

And projects that deliver mixed results—perhaps achieving schedule objectives while eroding business value—may offer some of the richest lessons of all.

The objective is not to repeat every action associated with success or avoid every action associated with failure.

It is to understand which decisions and conditions genuinely influenced the outcome, then apply that understanding intelligently in the next context.

That is how experience becomes organizational intelligence.

I have long believed that projects execute the consequences of decisions.

Those decisions should benefit from the experience of projects that came before them.

Yet too often, we measure organizational learning by the number of lessons captured rather than by the quality of decisions subsequently made.

I would propose a different standard:

And when those differences consistently produce better outcomes, learning begins to translate into genuine organizational capability—and potentially competitive advantage.

This is the central idea behind THE BEST PROJECTS PLATFORM with Akin Oni: exploring how great leaders turn success and failure into repeatable excellence.

Through articles, project stories, conversations, and practical insights, we will examine not only what happened on consequential projects, but what leaders and organizations can learn—and apply—to make the next project better.

Because the best projects are not necessarily those without problems.