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The world is rapidly changing and industrial war has been replaced with "war amongst the people" (Smith 2007, p. 267). Today many armed forces are faced with new responsibilities and are operating in new environments, necessitating a higher ability to identify and implement improvements more rapidly than before (NATO SG, 2008). The Lessons Learned (LL) process helps to suggest solutions to identify shortcomings and facilitates in making positive experiences durable (French Air Forces, 2008). In organizational learning, there is a pronounced need to get hold of important experience, to reduce repetition of mistakes and facilitate for highquality experiences in purpose to improve. Those experiences represent an important input to the LL process, which in the end produces results that will be instilled back into the organisation. A serious weakness in several organizations seems to be that numerous experiences are poorly reported. Unfortunately there is little research conducted in the military field. On the contrary, there is a huge need in several organizations to get a LL-process implemented. This paper will focus on the initial parts in the LL-process, observation, report and some of the early analysis. The aim is to compare group performances with individual performances and ask if groups produce more mature experience-reports than individuals. The study was conducted within the Swedish Armed Forces and all participants were Swedish soldiers earlier deployed on international missions. The participants were asked to report experiences (problems, difficulties) from their assignment, using two different methods. Would method 1, with conditions that facilitate a united effort to generate thoughts and a critical discussion, improve the progress to produce additional or more mature experience reports, compared with individual performances? The results showed that groups produced somewhat higher scaled and more mature reports than individuals. No indication was found that any of the two methods used in the experiment produced an increased number of reports.

In the modern business environment a greater number of organizations act worldwide and regularly meet with new cultures and environments. The change calls for a more rapid learning process than previously, in order to adjust to new situations. In order to prevent incidents from recurring, organizations put effort into collecting information after incidents. Learning from experience is often associated with incidents and accidents, however it can also concern positive occurrence. The purpose of the collection is to explore knowledge, analyse what happened and find the root-cause (basic contributions facts and circumstantial conditions) of the incident. If the root-cause is found, the organisation has possibilities to make changes in order to avoid similar incidents and to respond to crises. The collection is regularly done through pre-printed forms, but the reports are seldom sufficient as they often tend to lack vital information. We state, the answers in incident reports are closely related to the form design and the questions arising in the form. To improve the collection method, we designed a structured incident reporting form, using interview and questionnaire research and focused on the aim of the information collection. Our new form was compared to the unstructured form (at present used in the Swedish Armed Forces and NATO) in two experiments. Forty participants from the Swedish National Defence College were recruited to watch film sequences displaying incidents, and in the time that followed report and describe the incident they had observed in writing. The new structured form led to significantly improved results in both experiments. Structured incident reports, with a focus on the customers’ requests, appear to significantly improve after incident reporting. As incident reports become more complete, analysts have an enhanced possibility to find the basic contributing factors and circumstances and there will be a better possibility to learn in the organization and to avoid similar incidents in the future.