Sustainability Initiative Lessons Learned
This is a practical guide to building a lessons learned for a sustainability initiative project — what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects, adapted to the realities of delivering an environmental sustainability initiative.
What a Lessons Learned is
A lessons learned is what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects. For the full concept and how it works in general, see Lessons Learned. On a sustainability initiative project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for a Sustainability Initiative project
Sustainability Initiative projects live or die on delivering an environmental sustainability initiative. A well-built lessons learned gives the team a shared, explicit reference for exactly that — reducing ambiguity, aligning stakeholders, and making problems visible early enough to act. Skipping it, or doing it generically, is how sustainability initiative projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- What happened
- Impact
- Root cause
- Recommendation
Sustainability Initiative-specific considerations
Tailor the lessons learned to the risks that most often derail sustainability initiative projects:
- Measuring and verifying impact
- Cross-department coordination
- Credibility
Example
On a real sustainability initiative project, the lessons learned would be shaped by delivering an environmental sustainability initiative. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — measuring and verifying impact, cross-department coordination, credibility — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.