Capturing and sharing knowledge can be a highly leveraged conservation strategy, ensuring that the broader conservation community benefits from your experience. All too often, we omit this very important step. When we do so, we lose important opportunities for leverage and advancement, we risk making others reinvent what we have already invented, and all too often we repeat failures. By taking the time to reflect on what you have learned, and then sharing it appropriately, you can have an impact far beyond your own strategy’s physical or thematic boundaries.
Discuss within your team, and with key stakeholders as appropriate, the key lessons that you have learned in the process of identifying challenges and goals. Think about what kinds of evidence and knowledge will benefit the advancement of understanding and the work of others. Did your situation analysis reveal any surprises that might apply in other, similar situations? Did you create products during the course of your work, whether they were tools that you used to create analyses or the results of your analysis that might be useful to others? Did you conduct syntheses or collect new information that advance academic science?
When you have undertaken a significant new initiative, especially if it’s in relatively uncharted territory, a “Lessons Learned” document can help others navigate similar terrain in the future. This can be a considerable undertaking, so it’s important to dedicate appropriate staff resources to the project — and to ensure that the project is worth the effort.