Which of the Following Acts as a Repositroy of Lessons Learned Information and After Action Reviews
The Idea in Brief
Like many managers, y'all probably deport after-action reviews (AARs) to extract lessons from key projects and apply them to others. But in most companies, AARs don't fulfill their promise: Scrapped projects, poor investments, and failed prophylactic measures repeat themselves—while hoped-for gains rarely materialize. One manufacturing executive, reading an AAR report for a failed project that had stumbled twice earlier, realized with horror that the team was "discovering" the same mistakes all over again.
How to transform your AARs from diagnoses of past failure into aids for future success? Realize that looking for lessons isn't the aforementioned equally learning them. View the AAR as an ongoing learning process—rather than a quondam meeting, report, or postmortem. Set the stage for AARs with rigorous before-action planning—articulating your intended results, anticipated challenges, and lessons from previous similar situations. Conduct mini-AARs later each project milestone—belongings everyone accountable for applying key lessons speedily in the next project stage.
Companies that primary this process proceeds—and sustain—competitive advantage. They avoid repeating the kinds of errors that gnaw away at stakeholder value. And instead of merely fixing problems, they accommodate more rapidly and effectively than rivals to challenges no one fifty-fifty imagined.
The Thought in Exercise
To ameliorate your AAR process:
Build Your AAR Regimen Slowly
Rather than applying the AAR procedure across the board, begin using it selectively—on projects where the payoff is greatest and leaders have committed to working through several AAR cycles.
Focus on efforts disquisitional to your team's mission, and so people will be motivated to participate.
Bear a Before-Action Review (BAR)
Before embarking on an of import project, answer these questions:
- "What are our intended results and metrics?" Does your team want to meliorate product quality? Accelerate its response to emergencies? Improve sales win/loss ratio?
- "What challenges do we anticipate?" Practice yous wait shortages of certain resources? A turn in customers' preferences?
- "What have we or others learned from similar projects?" Exist aboveboard nigh past failures—focusing on improving operation, non placing blame.
- "What will enable u.s. to succeed this fourth dimension?" What practices helped y'all succeed in earlier efforts? What worked before that should be tested nether different circumstances?
Responses to these questions align team members' objectives and set up the stage for effective AARs as your projection unfolds.
Conduct Mini-Confined and AARs
Break big projects into smaller chunks, bookended past short BAR and AAR meetings conducted in task-focused groups. You'll establish feedback loops that maximize project operation and foster an ongoing learning civilisation.
But tailor your process to fit each project and project phase. For example, during periods of intense activity, use brief daily AAR meetings to assist teams coordinate and amend the adjacent mean solar day's work. At other times, less frequent meetings—monthly or quarterly—may be sufficient to identify and right emerging bug.
Focus on Your Ain Squad's Learning
Lessons must first and foremost benefit your team, so resist whatsoever urge to create an AAR certificate specifically for some other corporate utilise. Focus team members on improving their own learning and, every bit a effect, their own performance.
Your people may generate a lesson during the AAR process, but they won't have learned the lesson until they've changed their behavior. It takes multiple iterations to produce solutions that stand up under any conditions.
Imagine an organization that confronts constantly irresolute competitors. That is always smaller and less well-equipped than its opponents. That routinely cuts its manpower and resources. That turns over a third of its leaders every year. And that still manages to win competition afterward competition afterward competition.
The U.S. Army'due south Opposing Force (ordinarily known equally OPFOR), a 2,500-member brigade whose task is to help ready soldiers for combat, is just such an system. Created to exist the meanest, toughest foe troops will ever face, OPFOR engages units-in-training in a variety of mock campaigns under a wide range of conditions. Every month, a fresh brigade of more than than four,000 soldiers takes on this continuing enemy, which, depending on the scenario, may play the role of a hostile army or insurgents, paramilitary units, or terrorists. The two sides boxing on foot, in tanks, and in helicopters dodging artillery, country mines, and chemic weapons.
Stationed on a vast, isolated stretch of California desert, OPFOR has the home-court reward. Simply the strength that's being trained—called Bluish Force, or BLUFOR, for the duration of the exercise—is numerically and technologically superior. Information technology possesses more dedicated resources and better, more rapidly available information. It is made upwardly of experienced soldiers. And information technology knows only what to await, because OPFOR shares its methods from previous campaigns with BLUFOR's commanders. In short, each of these very capable BLUFOR brigades is given practically every edge. Yet OPFOR most e'er wins.
Underlying OPFOR's consequent success is the style information technology uses the after-activity review (AAR), a method for extracting lessons from 1 effect or project and applying them to others. The AAR, which has evolved over the by two decades, originated at OPFOR'due south parent organization, the National Grooming Center (NTC). AAR meetings became a popular business tool after Beat out Oil began experimenting with them in 1998 at the proposition of board member Gordon Sullivan, a retired general. Teams at such companies equally Colgate-Palmolive, DTE Energy, Harley-Davidson, and J.M. Huber employ these reviews to identify both best practices (which they want to spread) and mistakes (which they don't desire to repeat).
OPFOR treats every activity every bit an opportunity for learning—about what to do but likewise, more of import, about how to think.
Most corporate AARs, however, are faint echoes of the rigorous reviews OPFOR performs. It is simply too easy for companies to turn the process into a pro forma wrap-upward. All too often, scrapped projects, poor investments, and failed safety measures end up repeating themselves. Efficient shortcuts, smart solutions, and sound strategies don't.
Instead of producing static "knowledge assets" to file away in a management written report or repository, OPFOR's AARs generate raw material that the brigade feeds back into the execution cycle.
For companies that want to transform their AARs from postmortems of past failure into aids for future success, there is no improve teacher than the technique's primary practitioner. OPFOR treats every action as an opportunity for learning—about what to practice but also, more of import, about how to think. Instead of producing static "knowledge avails" to file away in a management report or repository, OPFOR'southward AARs generate raw fabric that the brigade feeds back into the execution cycle. And while OPFOR's reviews extract numerous lessons, the group does non consider a lesson to exist truly learned until it is successfully practical and validated.
The battlefield of troops, tanks, and tear gas is very unlike from the battlefield of products, prices, and profits. Just companies that suit OPFOR'south principles to their own practices volition be able to integrate leadership, learning, and execution to gain rapid and sustained competitive advantage.
Why Companies Don't Larn
An appreciation of what OPFOR does correct begins with an understanding of what businesses do wrong. To encounter why even organizations that focus on learning often repeat mistakes, we analyzed the AAR and similar "lessons learned" processes at more than a dozen corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies. The fundamentals are substantially the same at each: Following a project or upshot, squad members gather to share insights and identify mistakes and successes. Their conclusions are expected to flow—by formal or informal channels—to other teams and eventually coalesce into best practices and global standards.
By and large though, that doesn't happen. Although the companies nosotros studied actively await for lessons, few learn them in a meaningful way. One leader at a large manufacturing visitor told united states of america nearly an after-action review for a failed project that had already broken downwardly twice before. Having read reports from the earlier attempts' AARs—which consisted primarily of ane-on-1 interviews—she realized with horror after several grueling hours that the team was "discovering" the aforementioned mistakes all over once again.
A somewhat different problem cropped up at a telecom company we visited. A squad of project managers there conducted rigorous milestone reviews and wrap-up AAR meetings on each of its projects, identifying issues and creating technical fixes to avoid them in future initiatives. Only it made no effort to apply what it was learning to deportment and decisions taken on its current projects. Later several months, the team had and then overwhelmed the arrangement with new steps and checks that the process itself began causing delays. Rather than improving learning and functioning, the AARs were reducing the team's ability to solve its problems.
We also studied a public agency that was running dozens of like projects simultaneously. At the end of each project, squad leaders were asked to complete a lessons-learned questionnaire about the methods they would or would not use again; what preparation the team had needed; how well members communicated; and whether the planning had been effective. Only the projects ran for years, and retentivity is less reliable than observation. Consequently, the responses of the few leaders who bothered to fill out the forms were often sweepingly positive—and utterly useless.
Those failures and many more like them stalk from three common misconceptions about the nature of an AAR: that it is a coming together, that it is a report, or that it is a postmortem. In fact, an AAR should exist more verb than substantive—a living, pervasive process that explicitly connects past feel with future action. That is the AAR as it was conceived back in 1981 to help Ground forces leaders adapt quickly in the dynamic, unpredictable situations they were sure to face. And that is the AAR as OPFOR practices information technology every solar day.
More than a Meeting
Much of the civilian world's confusion over AARs began because management writers focused simply on the AAR meeting itself. OPFOR's AARs, by contrast, are part of a cycle that starts before and continues throughout each entrada against BLUFOR. (BLUFOR units bear AARs besides, merely OPFOR has fabricated a art of them.) OPFOR'due south AAR regimen includes cursory huddles, extended planning and review sessions, copious note taking by anybody, and the explicit linking of lessons to future actions.
The AAR cycle for each phase of the entrada begins when the senior commander drafts "operational orders." This document consists of 4 parts: the job (what actions subordinate units must take); the purpose (why the task is important); the commander's intent (what the senior leader is thinking, explained so that subordinates can pursue his goals even if events don't unfold equally expected); and the stop state (what the desired outcome is). It might await like this:
Task:
"Seize key terrain in the vicinity of Tiefort City…
Purpose:
"…so that the primary try can safely pass to the north."
Commander's Intent:
"I desire to find the enemy's strength and place fixing forces there while our assault force maneuvers to his flank to complete the enemy's defeat. The plan calls for that to happen here, but if it doesn't, yous leaders have to tell me where the enemy is and which flank is vulnerable."
End State:
"In the end, I want our forces in control of the key terrain, with all enemy units defeated or cut off from their supplies."
The commander shares these orders with his subordinate commanders—the leaders in charge of infantry, munitions, intelligence, logistics, artillery, air, engineers, and communications. He then asks each for a "brief back"—a exact description of the unit'southward understanding of its mission (to ensure everyone is on the same page) and its role. This stride builds accountability: "Y'all said it. I heard information technology." The brief back subsequently guides these leaders as they work out execution plans with their subordinates.
Later that twenty-four hours, or the next morning, the commander'due south executive officer (his 2d in control) plans and conducts a rehearsal, which includes every key participant. Most rehearsals take place on a scale model of the battlefield, complete with hills sculpted from sand, spray-painted roads, and placards cogent major landmarks. The rehearsal starts with a restatement of the mission and the senior commander's intent, an intelligence update on enemy positions and strength, and a breakdown of the battle's projected critical phases. Each fourth dimension the executive officer calls out a phase, the unit leaders step out onto the terrain model to the position they expect to occupy during that part of the action. They land their groups' tasks and purposes within the larger mission, the techniques they will apply in that phase, and the resource they expect to have available. After some give-and-take about what tactics the enemy might use and how units will communicate and coordinate in the thick of battle, the executive officer calls out the next phase and the procedure is repeated.
As a result of this disciplined training, the action that follows becomes a learning experiment. Each unit of measurement within OPFOR has established a clear understanding of what it intends to do and how it plans to practise information technology and has shared that understanding with all other units. The units have individually and collectively made predictions almost what will occur, identified challenges that may arise, and built into their plans ways to address those challenges. So when OPFOR acts, it will be executing a plan only likewise observing and testing that plan. The early meetings and rehearsals produce a testable hypothesis: "In this situation, given this mission, if we take this activeness, we will accomplish that consequence." OPFOR is thus able to select the crucial lessons information technology wants to acquire from each action and focus soldiers' attending on them in advance.
Such before-action planning helps establish the agenda for subsequently-activity meetings. Conversely, the rigor of the AAR meetings improves the care and precision that become into the before-action planning. As i OPFOR leader explained to united states: "We alive in an environment where nosotros know we will take an AAR, and nosotros will take to say out loud what worked and what didn't. That leads to asking tough questions during the planning stage or rehearsals and so that y'all know you have it equally correct as you tin get information technology. No subordinate volition permit the boss waffle on something for long earlier challenging him to say it clearly because information technology volition only come out later on in the AAR. As a event, AAR meetings create a very honest and disquisitional environment well before they begin."
The reference to AAR meetings—plural—is important. While a corporate team might conduct i AAR meeting at the end of a vi-calendar month project, OPFOR holds dozens of AARs at dissimilar levels in a single week. Each unit holds an AAR meeting immediately after each pregnant stage of an action. If fourth dimension is curt, such meetings may be no more ten-minute huddles around the hood of a Humvee.
Information technology is common for OPFOR'south AARs to be facilitated by the unit of measurement leader's executive officer. Virtually all formal AAR meetings begin with a reiteration of the house rules, fifty-fifty if anybody nowadays has already heard them a hundred times: Participate. No sparse skins. Leave your stripes at the door. Take notes. Focus on our issues, not the issues of those above us. (The participants' commanders concur their own AARs to address issues at their level.) Absolute candor is critical. To promote a sense of safety, senior leaders stay focused on improving performance, not on placing arraign, and are the showtime to acknowledge their own mistakes.
The AAR leader side by side launches into a comparison of intended and actual results. She repeats the mission, intent, and expected end country; she and then describes the actual end state, along with a cursory review of events and any metrics relevant to the objective. For example, if the unit of measurement had anticipated that equipment maintenance or logistics would be a claiming, what resources (mines, wire, ammo, vehicles) were functioning and available?
The AAR meeting addresses 4 questions: What were our intended results? What were our actual results? What caused our results? And what volition we sustain or improve? For example:
Sustain:
"Continual radio commo checks ensured nosotros could talk with everyone. That became of import when BLUFOR took a unlike route and we needed to reposition many of our forces."
Sustain:
"We chose proficient battle positions. That made it easier to identify friends and foes in infantry."
Improve:
"When fighting infantry units, we need to keep ameliorate track of the situation and so nosotros can attack the infantry earlier they dismount."
Ameliorate:
"How nosotros rails infantry. We look for trucks, merely we need to look for dismounted soldiers and understand how they'll effort to deceive usa."
Ane objective of the AAR, of course, is to determine what worked and what didn't, to help OPFOR refine its ability to predict what volition piece of work and what won't in the futurity. How well did the unit assess its challenges? Were at that place difficulties it hadn't foreseen? Problems that never materialized? Yes, it is important to right things; merely it is more important to correct thinking. (OPFOR has determined that flawed assumptions are the most common cause of flawed execution.) Technical corrections touch on only the problem that is fixed. A thought-procedure correction—that is to say, learning—affects the unit of measurement's ability to plan, adapt, and succeed in future battles.
More than a Study
At about civilian organizations nosotros studied, teams view the AAR chiefly as a tool for capturing lessons and disseminating them to other teams. Companies that treat AARs this way sometimes fifty-fifty translate the acronym equally after-activity study instead of after-activeness review, suggesting that the objective is to create a document intended for other audiences. Defective a personal stake, team members may participate only considering they've been told to or out of loyalty to the company. Members don't expect to learn something useful themselves, and so unremarkably they don't.
OPFOR's AARs, by dissimilarity, focus on improving a unit's own learning and, as a result, its own operation. A unit may generate a lesson during the AAR process, but by OPFOR's definition, information technology won't have learned that lesson until its members take changed their beliefs in response. Furthermore, soldiers need to see that information technology actually works. OPFOR's leaders know most lessons that surface during the get-go go-circular are incomplete or evidently wrong, representing what the unit of measurement thinks should work and not what actually does work. They understand that it takes multiple iterations to produce dynamic solutions that will stand up upwardly under any conditions.
The U.S. Ground forces's standing enemy brigade (referred to as OPFOR) applies the after-action review (AAR) process to everything information technology does, but that's non realistic for most companies. Concern leaders must act selectively, with an middle toward resources and potential payoffs. Don't even remember about creating an AAR regimen without determining who is likely to learn from it and how they volition benefit. Build slowly, kickoff with activities where the payoff is greatest and where leaders accept committed to working through several AAR cycles. Focus on areas critical to a squad's mission then members have good reason to participate. And customize the process to fit each project and project phase. For example, during periods of intense activity, brief daily AAR meetings can assist teams coordinate and meliorate the adjacent day'southward activities. At other times, meetings might occur monthly or quarterly and be used to identify exceptions in volumes of operational data and to understand the causes. The level of activity should always match the potential value of lessons learned. Here are some means yous tin employ AARs, based on examples from companies that take used them effectively.
For example, in one fight against a small, agile infantry unit, OPFOR had to protect a cave circuitous containing a big store of munitions. BLUFOR's infantry chose the assail route least predictable past OPFOR's commanders. Because scouts were slow to discover and communicate the alter in BLUFOR's movements, OPFOR was unable to prevent an attack that broke through its defence force perimeter. OPFOR was forced to hastily reposition its reserve and forrard units. Much of its firepower didn't reach the crucial boxing or arrived too late to affect the effect.
OPFOR's unit of measurement leaders knew they could excerpt many different lessons from this situation. "To fight an agile infantry unit of measurement, we must locate and attack infantry before soldiers can leave their trucks" was the first and most basic. But they as well knew that that insight was not enough to ensure hereafter success. For case, scouts would have to effigy out how to choose patrol routes and observation positions so every bit to rapidly and accurately locate BLUFOR's infantry before it breached the defense. Then staffers would demand to make up one's mind how to utilise information from observation points to plan constructive artillery missions—in the nighttime, against a moving target. The next challenge would be to test their assumptions to run into first, if they could locate and target infantry sooner; and second, what deviation that ability would brand to them achieving their mission.
OPFOR'southward need to test theories is another reason the brigade conducts frequent brief AARs instead of ane big wrap-up. The sooner a unit identifies targeting infantry as a skill it must develop, the more than opportunities it has to try out unlike assumptions and strategies during a rotation and the less likely those lessons are to grow stale. And so units design numerous pocket-size experiments—short cycles of "programme, prepare, execute, AAR"—within longer campaigns. That allows them to validate lessons for their own use and to ensure that the lessons they share with other teams are "complete"—meaning they tin exist applied in a variety of future situations. More important, soldiers meet their functioning improve as they apply those lessons, which sustains the learning culture.
Not all OPFOR experiments involve correcting what went wrong. Many involve seeing if what went right will continue to go right under dissimilar circumstances. And then, for instance, if OPFOR has validated the techniques it used to complete a mission, it might endeavour the same mission at night or against an enemy armed with cutting-border surveillance technology. A consulting-firm advertizement displays Tiger Woods squinting through the rain to complete a shot and the headline: "Conditions change. Results shouldn't." That could exist OPFOR'southward motto.
In fact, rather than writing off extreme situations as onetime exceptions, OPFOR embraces them as learning opportunities. OPFOR's leaders savour facing an unusual enemy or state of affairs because it allows them to build their repertoire. "It'southward a chance to measure simply how good we are, equally opposed to how good nosotros think we are," explained one OPFOR commander. Such an mental attitude might seem antithetical to companies that can't imagine purposely handicapping themselves in whatsoever try. Just OPFOR knows that the more challenging the game, the stronger and more active a competitor it will get.
More a Postmortem
Corporate AARs are oft convened around failed projects. The patient is pronounced dead, and anybody weighs in on the mistakes that contributed to his demise. The word "accountability" comes up a lot—more often than not it means "arraign," which participants expend considerable energy trying to avert. There is a sense of finality to these sessions. The team is putting a bad feel behind it.
"Accountability" comes up a lot during OPFOR'due south AARs as well, but in that context information technology is frontward-looking rather than backward-looking. Units are accountable for learning their own lessons. And OPFOR's leaders are accountable for taking lessons from one situation and applying them to others—for forging explicit links between past experience and time to come performance.
At the end of an AAR meeting, the senior commander stands and offers his ain cess of the day'due south major lessons and how they relate to what was learned and validated during earlier actions. He also identifies the two or three lessons he expects volition bear witness most relevant to the side by side battle or rotation. If the units focus on more than a few lessons at a time, they risk becoming overwhelmed. If they focus on lessons unlikely to be applied until far in the future, soldiers might forget.
At the meeting post-obit the infantry boxing described earlier, for example, the senior commander summed upward this way: "To me, this prepare of battles was a good rehearsal for something we'll see writ big in a few weeks. Nosotros actually do need to take lessons from these fights, realizing that we'll take a far more mobile attack unit. Deception will be an issue. Multiple routes will be an issue. Our job is to figure out mutual targets. We need to rethink how to track motility. How many scouts do we need in close to the objective area to see soldiers? They will be extremely well-equipped. So one matter I'm challenging everyone to practice is to exist prepared to discard your norms adjacent month. Information technology's time to sit down and talk with your sergeants about how yous fight a unit with a well-trained infantry."
Immediately after the AAR meeting breaks up, commanders gather their units to bear their own AARs. Each group applies lessons from these AAR meetings to programme its hereafter actions—for example, repositioning scouts to better track infantry movements in the next battle.
OPFOR also makes its lessons available to BLUFOR: The groups' commanders meet before rotations, and OPFOR'due south commander allows himself to exist "captured" past BLUFOR at the conclusion of battles in order to nourish its AARs. At those meetings, the OPFOR commander explains his brigade's planning assumptions and tactics and answers his opponents' questions.
Beyond those conferences with BLUFOR, formally spreading lessons to other units for afterward application—the principal focus of many corporate AARs—is non in OPFOR's job description. The U.South. Army uses formal knowledge systems to capture and disseminate important lessons to large, dispersed audiences, and the National Training Center contributes indirectly to those. (See the sidebar "Doctrine and Tactics.") Informal knowledge sharing amongst peers, however, is very common. OPFOR's leaders, for example, use email and the Internet to stay in touch with leaders on gainsay duty. The OPFOR team shares freshly hatched insights and tactics with officers in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan and Iraq; those officers, in turn, describe new and unexpected situations cropping upwardly in existent battles. And, of course, OPFOR's leaders don't stay out in the Mojave Desert forever. Every year as part of the Army's regular rotation, 1-third move to other units, which they seed with OPFOR-spawned thinking. Departing leaders leave behind "continuity folders" full of lessons and AAR notes for their successors.
In an environment where conditions change constantly, knowledge is always a work in progress. So creating, collecting, and sharing knowledge are the responsibility of the people who tin apply information technology. Knowledge is not a staff function.
The Corporate Version
It would be impractical for companies to prefer OPFOR's processes in their entirety. Still, many would benefit from making their own after-activity reviews more like OPFOR'southward. The business mural, after all, is competitive, protean, and often dangerous. An organization that doesn't merely excerpt lessons from experience merely actually learns them can adapt more rapidly and effectively than its rivals. And it is less likely to echo the kinds of errors that gnaw away at stakeholder value.
Most of the practices we've described can be customized for corporate environments. Simpler forms of operational orders and brief backs, for example, tin ensure that a project is seen the aforementioned manner past everyone on the team and that each member understands his or her role in it. A corporate version, chosen a earlier-action review (BAR), requires teams to answer four questions before embarking on an important activity: What are our intended results and measures? What challenges tin we anticipate? What have nosotros or others learned from like situations? What will make us successful this time? The responses to those questions align the squad'southward objectives and fix the phase for an constructive AAR meeting following the activeness. In addition, breaking projects into smaller chunks, bookended by short BAR and AAR meetings conducted in chore-focused groups, establishes feedback loops that tin aid a project team maximize performance and develop a learning culture over time.
Every organization, every squad, and every project will likely require different levels of training, execution, and review. However, nosotros have distilled some best practices from the few companies we studied that apply AARs well. For example, leaders should stage in an AAR regimen, get-go with the most important and complex work their business units perform. Teams should commit to holding short BAR and AAR meetings as they go, keeping things simple at first and developing the process slowly—calculation rehearsals, knowledge-sharing activities and systems, richer metrics, and other features dictated by the particular practice.
While companies will differ on the specifics they prefer, four fundamentals of the OPFOR process are mandatory. Lessons must first and foremost benefit the team that extracts them. The AAR process must start at the get-go of the activity. Lessons must link explicitly to future actions. And leaders must hold everyone, especially themselves, accountable for learning.
Past creating tight feedback cycles between thinking and activity, AARs build an organization'south power to succeed in a multifariousness of weather. Former BLUFOR brigades that are now deploying to the Middle East accept with them not but a set of lessons but likewise a refresher grade on how to describe new lessons from situations for which they did not train—situations they may non even take imagined. In a fast-changing environment, the chapters to learn lessons is more valuable than any individual lesson learned. That chapters is what companies can gain past studying OPFOR.
A version of this article appeared in the July–Baronial 2005 upshot of Harvard Business organization Review.
Source: https://hbr.org/2005/07/learning-in-the-thick-of-it
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