It’s Not What You Do; It’s What You Do After You’ve Done It
So how did you do?
Really. No “nicey nicey” banal comments please on how it was “great”. What really worked – and why? And what really didn’t work – and why not? What role did you have? In the success? In the failures?
After a project or an event, it’s rare that anyone, either individually or as a team, sits down to reflect on what has unfolded.
Where does learning come from?
Ironically, the learning from an event comes primarily from the debrief rather than from the event itself.
That’s worth repeating because it is so profound and so often overlooked: the learning from an event comes primarily from the debrief rather than from the event itself.
It’s a delicate art to conduct a retrospective that’s powerful and useful and not a destructive critique.
Most of us don’t bother with a post-event analysis. But even when we do, they can be painfully horrible affairs: a combination of passive-aggressive politeness with no one willing to mention the “dead moose” (or “dead elephant” or “dead kangaroo”, depending on your country of origin) that is in the room. (For those unfamiliar with the phrase, we’re talking about the thing that’s big and rotten and getting in the way of everything).
The After Action Review
An After Action Review (AAR) is focused primarily on learning and building community. It is founded on two related principles:
1. This is not to judge success or failure (and hence apportion blame) but rather the focus is on what can be learned for moving forward.
2. There’s a belief (what Norman Kerth calls the Prime Directive) that regardless of what’s discovered, the participants understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
Five powerful questions
With that in place, there are five simple and profound questions to ask.
1. What did you intend?
This can be a simple restatement of your objectives. What were you trying to achieve?
2. What happened?
This is useful for just getting a sense of what really happened. You can rest assured that your perspective of events is only one of the versions.
The objective here is to collect both “the facts” (such as costs, number of people involved, figures, etc) and differing opinions on what worked and didn’t work, what circumstances influenced what happened, and other factors.
When commenting on others’ roles, capture specific behavioural events (what they did, what they said) rather than your conclusion about what they did (X did a poor job because…).
3. What can we learn about it?
There will be different levels of learning here, from the very specific (“don’t wear Brand X socks – they give you blisters”) to the more abstract (“this project wasn’t close enough to my life purpose for me to be motivated”).
Don’t forget to ask here “what did we do well that we need to discuss or else it will be forgotten?” It’s very easy to jump to “the mistakes”. It’s most powerful to start with what’s been working.
Capture also “what still puzzles us?” You won’t be able to figure everything out. Be explicit about what it is that still is a mystery.
4. What should we do differently next time?
This is powerful because it plants seeds for the “next time” conversation. Without these seeds, we default back to a collective memory of “this is how we do things around here” which most often does not capitalize on the collected wisdom.
5. What should we do now?
There may well be actions to take right now: things to do, people to connect with.
As with all actions, set up accountability: what will be done, by whom and by when.
Learning and Reflection I believe helps us to grow. As a coach this is something I am taking forwards by focusing on how supervision helps us to do great work in the coaching space. By working through coaching situations we can look with a different perspective which helps us to both learn and to deepen the work we do, to the overall benefit both of our own self awareness and the benefit of our clients
Here’s the problem I have with a lot of these reviews: Nothing ever changes.
It comes down to two things 1) People don’t do the things they were actioned to do 2) When we start a new project nobody goes back and reviews the learnings from the previous one. So we end up reinventing the wheel.
When these problems are solved the process will work far better. As a business process consultant things like this are the bane of my life. That’s why we need to ensure that (As per Comerford’s Three Laws of Metrics) “If you’re going to measure something at least have a means of feeding this back into the process and affecting change”. It’s the key item, in my opinion
Good post, Thanks
Gary
Hi Michael,
I love the simplicity of your debrief. I have been involved in a couple of types of debriefing. One is a critical incident and was ‘informal” inasmuch as it was a colleague leading a group of friends on a snow camping overnighter. We got caught in a scary situation and though no-one was hurt he wanted to do the debrief for the learning to be harvested AND to allow the processing of feelings and reactions. FANTASTIC. One of the participants in this group was my 11 year old son and it was a great learning experience for him in so many, many ways. My friend doing the debrief was a member of the Aust Army Alpine Team so he was well trained in the process. The other type of debrief was post-project implementation. A DISASTER. The mid-point evaluation was skipped. Measureable data was limited to one critiera (cost). The debrief occurred by speaking to some of the stakeholders(those setting up & running the project) separately and asking what they thought and what they wanted to have happen next. No-one spoke to the recipients of the project – our customers. As you can imagine the project ground to a halt. All the money spent has been wasted as we are back to where we started. Those who were opposed to the proposed changes are pleased. Those who were for change are frustrated and disappointed. The whole thing looks like a schmozzle. None of the useful aspects/outcomes have been retained. Not even back to square one because relationships have been strained and trust has been dented.
One last point. My experience has been that people find it very hard to make clear, objective observations. Most “observations” are evaluations because they have opinions, exaggerations, judgments embeded. NVC has done wonderful work on making clear observations. I think this enhances the process you are talking about. An evaluation leads to argument about rightness and what happened. Observations lead to agreement and can takes us forward to the next step in the debrief.
Leona
I quite agree on the value of NVC – it’s a model I use all the time, teasing apart data from judgments and feelings
Excellent advice!
Similar to the debriefing I teach.
I’ve learned to ask for feedback as our own perceptions are sometimes clouded by our own perceptions!