The Best Thing You Can Do TODAY
My working title for this post was “And That was Good/Bad Because… Why?” This month’s *SMIT (Single Most Important Thing I have to tell you): Working smarter requires us to get smarter. How do we do this? One great way is through the After Action Review (AAR), which I learned about through Beth Kanter’s blog. Thank you Beth!
What the Morbidity and Mortality Conference is to the field of medicine, the AAR is to everything else. It can be particularly useful in helping improve our social media strategy, as it is well suited to evaluating experimentation and pilot projects. And, let’s be honest, social media is a brave frontier for most of us. An AAR is centered on four questions:
- What was expected to happen?
- What actually occurred?
- What went well and why?
- What can be improved and how?
AAR was first used by the U.S. Army on combat missions and proved to be extraordinarily successful in offering a safe, structured approach for reflecting on the work of a group and identifying strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement:
The art of an AAR is in the obtainment of mutual trust so that people will speak freely. Innovative behavior should be the norm. Problem solving should be pragmatic and employees should NOT be preoccupied with status, territory, or second guessing “what the leader will think.” There is a fine line between keeping the meeting from falling into chaos where nothing real gets accomplished, to people treating each other in a formal and polite manner that masks issues (especially with the boss) where again, nothing real gets accomplished.
An AAR encourages all stakeholders to share and learn in order to have continuous improvement. Everyone on the team participates. There is one facilitator. Participation is open, honest and professional. Feedback is captured on a white board or online document. The process can be done in person or online. There is a focus on results: How can we sustain what worked well? How can we overcome challenges that presented obstacles?
The bottom line is to find out how we can do this better the next time. It can be applied at a project’s conclusion or used in the middle of a project or strategy to learn while doing. This seems obvious as heck to me, but how often do we really engage, formally or informally, in this type of focused, respectful evaluation designed solely with the purpose of learning (and not with an eye towards assigning blame)?
Guidelines for conducting AARs
- Gather all the players.
- Introduction and rules.
- Review events leading to the activity (what was supposed to happen).
- Give a brief statement of the specific activity.
- Summarize the key events. Encourage participation.
- Have junior leaders restate portions of their part of the activity.
- Do not turn it into a critique or lecture. The following will help:
- Ask why certain actions were taken.
- Ask how they reacted to certain situations.
- Ask when actions were initiated.
- Ask leading and thought provoking questions.
- Exchange war stories (lessons learned).
- Ask employees what happened in their own point of view.
- Relate events to subsequent results.
- Explore alternative courses of actions that might have been more effective.
- Complaints are handled positively.
- When the discussion turns to errors made, emphasize the positive and point out the difficulties of making tough decisions.
- Summarize.
- Allow junior leaders to discuss the events with their people in private.
- Follow-up on needed actions.
If you become an AAR facilitator, which every leader needs to do:
- Remain unbiased throughout the review.
- Try to speak to draw out comments from all.
- Do NOT allow personal attacks.
- The focus should be on learning and continuous improvement.
- Strive to allow others to offer solutions, rather than you offering them.
Do you use After Action Reviews? Do you have another process that enables you to work smarter rather than just harder? If so, please share your experiences.
2 Comments
This is terrific! We have a strong organizational culture around what we call "Debrief Moments" but basically is this AAR without the formalized process. After every training, meeting, conference, clinic, phase in a project, fundraising event the team gathers and does a debrief – some take 2 hours, some take 15 minutes. We write up the minutes from those meetings and it is an expectation that the entire team review all past debrief notes before starting planning on the next phase, meeting, training, event, etc. This is a terrific way of formally structuring the process – and introducing new staff to it in a way that allows them to participate from day one. Also – this is interesting – but I had never considered applying this tactic to our use of social media – great tip!
Thanks Julia! So great that you do this, and glad this will be helpful to you moving forward. Congratulations for working smart. 😉