On 8th November 2023 Tom Dyson ran a two-hour interactive workshop with officers from the Netherlands and a variety of NATO member-states/partner-states participating in the Netherlands Joint Advanced Command and Staff Course.

Prof Dyson receiving a gift for his contribution to the Advanced Command and Staff Course

This workshop, his second invited presentation at the Netherlands Defence Academy, provided an opportunity for participants to again read and provide feedback on the results of the research that Tom and Dr John Tull have undertaken on Netherlands military learning as part of the ESRC project ‘A Revolution in Military Learning? Uncovering the Potential of Lessons-Learned Processes’ (ES/V004190/1).

A core theme of the research is to reinterpret formal learning processes in terms of the practices that stakeholders and their sub-organisations exercise in engaging with challenging situations and novelty. These experiential dimensions seem to significantly affect how observations are interpreted and communicated as potential lessons, and how well the organisation processes and shares validated lessons -- vital issues, especially in rapidly changing environments. Tom and John therefore designed the workshop to also involve a role play scenario where officers examined the challenges associated with the development of joint and service-level lessons-learned processes within the Netherlands Armed Forces.