Make after action reviews part of your organizational DNA

Called “one of the most successful organizational learning methods yet devised,” the After Action Review was developed by the United States Army in the 1970s to help its soldiers learn from both their mistakes and achievements. Since then, the AAR has been used by many companies for performance assessment. And yet, as The Fifth Discipline author Peter Senge notes, efforts to bring the practice into corporate culture most often fail because “again and again, people reduce the living practice of AARs to a sterile technique.”

The process itself is an active discussion centered on four key questions:

• What did we intend to accomplish (what was our strategy)?
• What did we do (how did we execute relative to our strategy)?

 

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