[djmcmath]

Jordi -- PM sent, thanks for the offer.

Competent -- good call. Some of what we do is done like that. Nuclear reactor related lessons go to Naval Reactors, who filters them and sends them back out to the fleet. Rather than announcing "The USS Umpty-fish dorked up such-and-such," the message says, "Recently, a ship of this class made such-and-such mistake while performing such-and-such maintenance." There are several problems with the implementation:
1 - True anonymity is impossible. There are only so many ships of such-and-such class doing such-and-such maintenance, and it's a small world, in that sense. Within 24 hours of a report from NR, word is out about which boats dorked up which things. The funny thing, of course, is that anonymity amongst boats isn't really a problem: we're not afraid to talk about our mistakes with each other. It's if the "boss" finds out that we're concerned.
2 - The designated "priest/confessor" is the boss -- the one person that we really don't want to find out that we've screwed up. The only way to get word of mistakes out to the other boats is to report yourself to the boss.

So to fix this, we'd have to change that culture, the culture of senior leadership to say "I don't want to hear Bad News, and I especially don't want to hear about any lessons you've learned that aren't important (important: Bad News)." I'll add that to my point paper. I don't think my boss is going to like this at all. "Sir, the reason that submarines are bad at sharing knowledge isn't something I can fix with snazzy new technology. It's actually a problem that nobody does well, but that we do worse at because of poor cultural decisions we've made over the last 20 years."


I welcome your continuing thoughts. I think that my efforts will be a drop in the bucket towards fixing the problem, and I'm going to go away seeing no major change, but it's definitely a goal worth working towards. Thanks, all.

Dan