Keywords: LEAF (Learning from Experience-Applying systematic Feedback), IPA (Intentions, Practices and Aspirations), 3Ps (Process, Product and Performance).

The findings of our recent study LEAF (Learning from Experience-Applying systematic Feedback to improve the briefing process in construction) confirm that the construction industry faces a difficult task in order to overcome the pervasive, persistent and prevalent culture of resistance to learning from experience. Crucially even in those organisations where top management are committed to promoting a culture of learning as a key driver to making continuous improvements in business and constructional performance they are hampered by a lack of relevant and appropriate tools or mechanisms and the nature of learning contexts. This together with the need to disseminate the messages emanating from LEAF that was instrumental in us developing a set of dedicated tools for use by management in order to engineer change and to foster learning from experience.

These tools build on the findings from LEAF, which confirm much of modern educational theory that procedures or instructions do not necessarily engineer change and there is need to emphasize learning rather than instructing activities. What is important is to deliver the message through settings such as seminars where participants are encouraged and helped to learn the message themselves. LEAF allowed us to develop an abstract generic model, which provides an analytical basis to assist organisations in understanding their particular situation. The model distinguishes what we describe as the three fundamental elements of learning - (IPA) `Intentions', `Practices' and `Aspirations'. `Intentions' define `what the project teams are supposed to be doing?' whereas an organisation's actual `Practices' are represented by `what the project teams are actually doing?' The model links or contrasts intentions and practices from `Aspirations' denoting `what the project teams would like to be doing?' Over the last 30 years or so, most process maps devised and implemented by many organisations have tended to represent the organisation's policy or `Intentions' with consequences that designers and planners have largely been alienated from users or operators on the ground. Equally LEAF builds on outputs from the York Studies which identified that projects can be evaluated by investigating the - 3Ps (`Process', `Product' and `Performance') and discriminating what happens at the three stages of projects - pre-project, project and post-project. Much value is added to construction design if learning is maximised at the pre-project stage than at any other stage.

Essentially the tools to foster learning in organisations are diagnostic in that they seek to establish the situation an organisation is in, has been and or wishes to be in. We surmise that different situations offer different benefits such as increased productivity and other aspects characterising successful organisations as well as disadvantages. However, as change-engineering tools, they aim to alter the state or situation of the particular organisation or of project teams through identified optional routes. Clearly therefore these tools are aimed at the intractable aspects of an organisation so as to enhance its learning capacity notably by exploiting its learning potential as well as by transferring the wealth of knowledge acquired or gained in the course of one project to subsequently inform other projects. This transfer is helpful in that resources are used more effectively, avoids `re-inventing the wheel' and ensures that successes are repeated and pitfalls avoided. When learning occurs across departments or organisations or different sectors and associated teams brings with it new ideas, new solutions to problems while increasing the potential for innovation.

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