The military uses reports known as After Action Reviews to assess what went right and what went wrong after a battle. Now the business world is using AARs to formalize the learning process.
“An after action review is nothing more than a group of people which gets together after something has happened to look at how they did and what they can improve on the next time,” says Marilyn Darling, president of Signet Consulting.
Darling studied the military’s techniques at the elite National Training Center, where groups of soldiers from the squad level all the way up to entire brigades do a daily review.
“They compare their performance against doctrine that’s been established over the years,” says Darling.
One of the biggest challenges to incorporating AARs into the corporate environment is finding the time to look at what happened yesterday to learn from the experience. Finding a good indicator, or benchmark, to measure a group against can also be challenging.
What Darling discovered is that if a business unit or team can choose an indicator and keep doing AARs, eventually, the members will find their own best measurement device to set their standards.
“If they just take the time to learn from experience and keep coming back to it, they will find a better indicator if they need one,” says Darling. “It doesn’t matter what they choose, but the group has to choose it, not someone outside the group.”
The Boston Police Department uses a type of AAR to evaluate a precinct’s performance. As they improved their performance based on the data they had, precincts began asking for more detailed data so they could fine-tune their actions.
“They have gotten so invested in driving the crime stats down, they feel they need the tools to get better indicators,” says Darling.
The defining characteristic is that the indicator is locally driven and simple.
“It’s intended to help local groups drive toward better performance,” says Darling.
AARs are a formalized way of learning, with a means of sharing the knowledge gained with others in an organization. There are three sources of value from a learning experience documented in an AAR:
1) The local group keeps the document about what they learned and applies lessons learned to the next task.
2) The knowledge is transferred into a database so other groups can have access to this information.
3) At an organizational level, companies can look for patterns and adjust training and development accordingly. The Army discovered troops were having trouble breaching obstacles and minefields, which was later traced to a lack of proper equipment and training. This situation was rectified, and troops were better prepared for the task during the Gulf War.
“The most powerful form of learning is when an organization turns knowledge back on itself with, ‘How are we doing?’’” says Darling. “You can see a real performance difference. It gives each member a sense of responsibility to get better results out of something that may seem random.”
AARs are scalable, and can be applied to any size group. The review process shouldn’t take more than two hours, even at the highest level. Some common questions to include in an AAR are:
1) What did we intend to accomplish?
2) What did we accomplish?
3) What caused the difference?
4) What success do we want to sustain?
5) What do we need to improve?
6) (For the top level:) When and how do we apply these lessons?
Todd Shryock ([email protected]) is SBN’s special reports editor.
