[pfannkuchen]

I think the problem with “lesson” is that it sounds like you started out in the wrong. An important part of corpspeak is never directly accusing anyone of being wrong or directly admitting having been wrong yourself. Acquiring learnings does not have this connotation (possibly because it is a nonsense word).

[mnsc]

Thank you for making me realize what I don't like about "lessons learnt". I don't care about corpspeak but when you are an agile team involved in continous learning it's very important to be able to tell someone that they are in the wrong. They might have put in two weeks of hard work devolving a poc in a area the team know little about only to present it wider and get the feedback that this won't work because of x, u and z. Then you haven't "learned your lessons" because we don't yet have the right answer. BUT we got some very good learnings from this failed work that we need to remember/use in the next attempt.

[retrocryptid]

You would think we would have a word that better expresses something like: "you did some quality work, but it was insufficient to relieve us of our collective ignorance."

And in a way that your manager won't say something like "but this violates our corporate principal: 'be right, often.'"

Maybe there's a word for this in German. They have a number of words for seemingly specific situations. And I'm not above Introducing a few more foreign words to our corporate lexicon. We're already using Fingerspitzengefühl, Schwerpunkt and Feierabend.

[retrocryptid]

That sounds legit. The last thing we want in corp-speak is to establish culpability. "Experiences" might work instead, but it sounds very Californian.