Hi Reader,

Many years ago when we lived in the Midwest, we became very good friends with a young couple down the street.

He was a fellow fraternity brother from another college, but I remember him as a very capable pathologist with a unique ability to describe complex medical subjects in layman's language.

One day, he asked me if I'd like to go to work with him on Saturday.

He'd show me around, we'd have lunch ... just hang out.

He couldn't leave for lunch, but he would bring along some homemade sandwiches – bologna with lots of ketchup, he said – and I could sit alongside him in his pathology lab as he performed an autopsy – and while he was cutting and sawing, we would enjoy our lunch together.

It was when he started laughing that I realized why my vision of an overloaded bologna sandwich, dripping with ketchup alongside an autopsy table, was kicking up a firestorm in my gut.

That's pretty close to the reaction of many business executives when presented with an opportunity to conduct an After Action Review (AAR) – what some regard as a gruesome process designed to relive the pain of failed projects.

I was familiar with the process because the U.S. Army is generally viewed as the origin of the AAR process, but when I proposed it to another senior executive years ago, he responded:

That response pretty well captures why After Action Reviews can make executives uncomfortable.

If the project failed, we want to know who made the mistake. If it succeeded, we're inclined to congratulate ourselves and move on.

Neither response teaches us very much.

The purpose of an After Action Review isn't to identify the culprit. It's to understand what you expected to happen, what actually happened, why it happened – and what you should do differently the next time.

Sometimes the most valuable lessons come from things that went right – particularly when they went right for reasons we didn't anticipate.

That's not assigning blame.

That's learning.

That's why the After Action Review is not a new version of "The Blame Game."

I mentioned the After Action Review in last week's newsletter, 7 Steps to Build Flexibility into Your Company's DNA.

On Wednesday, we'll review Powerful After Action Reviews, with the structure you can apply to make it work for your organization.