How Do You Run an After-Action Review?

Where It Came From

The U.S. Army adopted the After-Action Review in the 1970s at the National Training Center, where units fought a dedicated opposing force and usually lost. The losses were the point. After each engagement, an observer walked the unit through what the plan said, what the ground truth was, and where the two parted company. Rank was left at the door. A private who saw the gap was expected to say so, and a commander who caused it was expected to hear it.

The practice spread to every echelon because it worked. It is now the single most transferable discipline the military has produced, and most civilian organizations have never run one properly.

The Four Questions

The AAR is nothing more than four questions asked in order. The order matters, because each one protects the next from drifting into blame or opinion.

Why It Compounds

A single AAR fixes one problem. A monthly AAR changes how the organization thinks. The team starts writing clearer plans because it knows the plan will be read back to it. Reporting improves because question two depends on it. Decisions get documented because question three will ask who made them and on what information.

The compounding is in the standard. Each review produces a small, written change to how the work is done. Over a year that is twelve corrections, each one tested against the next month's reality. Organizations that do not review repeat the same miss with different people, and call it bad luck.

Rules That Keep It Honest

• No rank in the room. The most junior person present can state a fact that contradicts the most senior. If that cannot happen in your organization, fix that before you run an AAR.
• Facts before causes, causes before fixes. Teams want to jump to the fix. Hold the order.
• The leader goes first on what went wrong. A leader who opens by naming their own mistake buys the honesty of everyone else.
• Sustain as well as improve. What worked is written down too, or it is lost the next time the roster changes.
• Same format every time. The value is in the repetition. An AAR that changes shape each month is a meeting, not a discipline.

Where It Fails

Three failure modes account for almost every AAR that stopped being useful.

It becomes a blame session. Question three gets asked about people instead of about the plan and the information they had. The next month, nobody volunteers a fact.

It becomes a ceremony. The review runs, the list is made, nobody owns an item, and the same items appear next month. The cure is question four: no owner, no entry.

It only runs after disasters. A review that only follows failure is a trial. Run it after wins too. A win with an unexamined cause is a loss waiting for different conditions.

How a First Sergeant Runs One

Our Principal closed operations with an AAR for 22 years, across four combat deployments and in readiness, budget, and logistics leadership for more than 3,000 personnel. The method he brings to a client is the one that survived that use: forty-five minutes, a whiteboard, the four questions in order, and two lists on the wall when it ends. Every Mission Success Solutions engagement closes the same way, including the ones that go well.

Run It This Month

Pick one project, launch, or quarter that just ended. Put the people who did the work in a room for forty-five minutes. Ask the four questions in order and write the answers where everyone can see them. Give each improvement an owner and a date. Put the next AAR on the calendar before you leave. Do it four times, then read the first one again and count how many of its items are still open.

Questions