Something in the Environment Agency’s current recruitment for its Director of Incident Management, Operational Risk and Resilience caught my attention.
The role covers a substantial remit, including incident preparedness, response and recovery. But alongside those responsibilities are two words that I think are particularly important: organisational learning.
That is the Environment Agency’s wording, not ours. And I think the distinction matters.
Most organisations are well practised in responding when something goes wrong. The incident is managed, information gathered, an investigation may follow, causes identified and actions agreed. Eventually, the incident is closed.
But closing an incident and learning from it are not necessarily the same thing.
The investigation is a means, not the end
An investigation has value because of what the organisation does with the understanding it creates.
Did we understand what actually happened and why? Did that understanding lead to a better decision? Did something meaningfully change as a result? And, importantly, can someone elsewhere in the organisation benefit from what was learned?
For me, that progression looks something like this:
Investigation → Understanding → Decision → Improvement → Performance
The investigation is an important part of the process, but it isn’t the destination.
The Environment Agency appears to be thinking about this more broadly too. Its published corporate reporting has previously described improving how it learns from incidents so that risk-reduction actions can be shared across teams and with businesses. Its recently published Reservoir Safety Research Strategy 2026 also identifies learning from incidents as a recurring theme, including the need to translate findings into practice.
That doesn’t mean every problem needs a major investigation. Far from it.
Some problems need a relatively simple analysis. Others warrant a much deeper investigation involving different teams, evidence and specialist methods. The depth should be proportionate to the problem.
Not every problem needs a specialist investigation. Every problem should contribute to what your organisation knows.
Turning individual learning into organisational learning
This is where the bigger opportunity lies.
An incident can be investigated extremely well and still create very little organisational learning. The people involved might understand exactly what happened and make sensible changes locally, but that knowledge can easily remain with that team, investigation or report.
What happens when a similar cause appears somewhere else? Can the organisation recognise it? Can leaders see patterns developing across different incidents? Can previous learning inform the next decision rather than another team starting again?
That is the difference between learning from an incident and building organisational learning from many incidents over time.
Technology can help connect that learning, but the thinking itself should remain human-led. Understanding causation requires context, judgement, challenge and the ability to distinguish what happened from what actually caused it.
The response deals with what is happening now. The investigation helps us understand why it happened. The bigger opportunity is making sure that understanding improves what the organisation does next.
Author: Jonathan Batchelor is CEO at What Caused This
