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

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.