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After Action Reviews (“AAR”) are irreplaceable Accountability Tools

The AAR is an undernourished sibling of accountability – but it's a highly effective tool to help us learn from our past performance and create a state of continuous improvement.

The AAR originated with the U.S. Army. From a modest introduction in the mid-1970s, it has become a vital part of military culture.

The term is often wrongly identified as an After Action Report, but it's NOT a "report" someone writes and files away.

An After Action Review is a robust discussion among everyone involved – designed to learn what happened and to improve performance in the future.

It's Similar to Other Reviews

In many ways, it resembles the Chalk Talks that many of us have experienced in sports, an opportunity to diagnose what happened and learn from it to improve future performance.

During the NFL season, professional football teams generate real-time images from elevated cameras and send them to printers behind the players’ bench, allowing quarterbacks and coaches to diagnose formations and results—and make adjustments on the very next set of downs.

Pixar Puts AAR to the Test

In an article about Pixar’s decision-making, Tom Davenport, a Babson College professor, refers to “After Action Reviews” as a critical element of the creative decision-making used at Pixar.

Here is a brief summary. (The original article, Five Ways Pixar Makes Better Decisions, can be found behind a paywall at the Harvard Business Review.)

1. Pixar’s directors get a lot of freedom. It allows them to express and elaborate their vision.
2. Pixar doesn’t spare the feedback. The film in progress is shown to the entire animation team for criticism and comments.
3. A complete postmortem is mandatory. After a film is wrapped, Pixar always brings teams together to analyze what could have gone better (even when the product has been a success.)
4. The company is willing to admit mistakes. When Toy Story 2 wasn’t developing well, Pixar wasn’t afraid to pull the plug and start over from scratch.
5. It educates its employees. Pixar’s staff learns to manage, fail, and recover together in more than 110 different courses at Pixar University.

Pixar Uses the Concept of “Dailies”

For Pixar, Davenport reminds us how filmmakers use “dailies” to review their work in progress, showing movies to other filmmakers every few months to solicit critical insights that often make the movies better.

Nothing you couldn’t accomplish with a Daily Huddle, right?

Ed Catmull, Co-Founder of Pixar, believes these “post-mortems” are a critical ingredient of Pixar’s success.

What Would You Do Again—and NOT Do Again?

One of Pixar's techniques during these reviews is to ask each member of the film team to come up with five things they’d do again … and five things they wouldn’t do again.

What a great way to neutralize potential dissension on the team so that everyone thinks about alternative ideas and shares criticism openly.

Pixar uses many techniques to build a vital creative process, but its After Action Reviews are a critical part of it—and offer valuable lessons for every organization seeking to improve execution.

How to Conduct an Effective After Action Review

The AAR reinforces accountability across the organization and can be implemented with four straightforward questions:

1. What was your intention?

This step is vital to ensure that everyone is clear about the expectations that were set and the standards of success to be applied.

The U.S. Army thinks of it in three separate components:

1. What are the tasks to be performed?
2. What are the conditions under which they’re likely to be performed?
3. What are the acceptable standards of success and how are they measured?

2. What really happened?

This is not as easy as it seems. Different individuals will have different recollections and experiences based on their vantage point.

In widely distributed organizations, it becomes even more difficult to synthesize those viewpoints and consolidate intelligence scattered throughout the organization.

Input from every level, coupled with objective and measured results, is essential to accurately determine what happened. Good facilitation is critical.

Army doctrine suggests spending 25 percent of the AAR time on two questions:

1. What tasks were being performed?
2. What were the expected results?

While it’s tempting to jump to the diagnosis, clarity about both intentions and expected results is fundamental to an informed discussion of how performance can be improved.

3. Why did it happen?

This diagnostic stage begins the unvarnished evaluation of why the results differed from plan expectations.

If you’re not willing to be honest and forthcoming as a leader, this phase will quickly unravel.

To encourage the best diagnosis, it is vital to promote a no-penalty environment in which people at all levels will honestly report their findings and observations.

4. How would we do it differently next time?

This final step is inseparable from the diagnosis and gets 50 percent of the AAR time in the Army protocol.

In this phase, focus on the things you can control and don’t be distracted by uncontrollable forces.

Be sure to identify what worked well, too. An AAR isn't only about correcting mistakes; it's equally important to identify and sustain the activities that lead to success.

Feedback is the Breakfast of Champions!

Prompt feedback, often immediately after the action itself, e.g., the NFL football example, is also critical to the success of an After Action Review process.

The quicker you gather feedback, the quicker improvements can be implemented, so regular and frequent sessions are essential.

Use these sessions as a learning tool to encourage candid feedback, greater accountability and continuous improvement.

The After Action Review is a powerful tool—inexpensive to implement, simple to apply and capable of becoming part of the culture of continuous improvement.

You should start today.