After-Action Review
The US Army has long been using after-action review (AAR) to draw lessons from activities and events.Various corporations have adopted the AAR process. Unfortunately, as Marilyn Darling, Charles Parry and Joseph Moore point out in a 2005 Harvard Business Review article, corporations have generally not emulated the rigor with which the Army ensures that lessons extracted from a particular activity are applied and validated in subsequent activities.
In explaining how corporations can do a better job of implementing AAR, Darling, Parry and Moore recommend that a project team have a before-action review (BAR) at the beginning of each phase of the project, and then a corresponding after action review at the end of each phase.
This phase-by-phase combination of BAR and AAR creates a feedback loop that helps maximize team performance, while also promoting a learning culture.
In the BAR meeting, the team addresses these questions:
- What are our intended results and measures?
- What challenges can we anticipate?
- What have we or others learned from similar situations?
- What will make us successful this time?
- What were our intended results?
- What were are actual results?
- What caused our actual results? (Note that the Army has found that flawed assumptions are the most common cause of flawed execution.)
- What will we sustain or improve?
- Lessons must directly benefit the team that extracts them.
- BAR must begin the process.
- Lessons must link explicitly to future actions.
- Everyone — managers and employees at all levels — must be accountable for learning.
Labels: Learning organization, Military training
posted by Karen Nelson @ 4:16 PM
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