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CHARLES PARRY, MARK PIRES, AND HEIDI SPARKES GUBER
Action Review Cycle and the After Action Review Meeting
Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
—John F. Kennedy
Real-Life Story
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR), named one of the “Best Medium Sized Companies to Work for in America,” wanted to increase its operational performance discipline—to learn rapidly from success and breakdowns alike.
Formal After Action Reviews (AARs) were conducted in two linked projects—a major expansion of the distribution center and an equipment acquisition. These AARs cascaded upward through the three levels doing the planning and execution: line operators, project leaders, then senior management. Successful practices and areas for improvement were identified and informed the next phases of the distribution center project, engineering improvements, and in further rounds of adding automation equipment.
Today, through the initiative of various leaders, Before Action Reviews (BARs) and/or AARs are used in the performance review process, hiring, finance, a major CRM project, managing response to regional blackouts, and helping the Corporate Responsibility team generate greater impact. GMCR has a bias toward learning throughout projects and ongoing work, rather than waiting for end points. Continuous Learning Director Pru Sullivan reflects: “BARs and AARs require discipline and rigor to actually make them work. They also give people a way to learn and take responsibility when things don’t go as planned—and to learn, take responsibility and to celebrate when things go well.”
Frequently Asked Questions
WHAT IS THE AAR/ARC? WHAT IS ITS PURPOSE?
The After Action Review (AAR) is a meeting that provides a feedback loop between intended and actual results in a team setting. Paired with a short Before Action Review (BAR) meeting, it functions as the heartbeat of a cycle that brings leading, learning, and execution together in service of sustaining success in a changing environment.
This cycle, known as the Action Review Cycle (ARC), has been used to accelerate leader development, improve operational performance, build an accountable learning organization, shape rapid transformation, and as a competitive strategy (agility).
WHAT IS UNIQUE ABOUT THIS METHOD?
A central challenge facing most organizations today is that their baseline reality has shifted from “stability with exceptions of change” to “change with exceptions of stability.” For these organizations, change management and interventions based in the “unfreeze-change-refreeze” paradigm no longer fit the situation, and tend to produce oscillation.
To sustain excellence in the face of changing conditions, the ability to learn and adjust must be a core competence—individually and organizationally. The ARC is a proven means to build this right into how work gets done.
WHEN AND WHERE IS THE ARC USED?
It is unfortunate that the word “After” in the term “AAR” contributed to many adopters of the U.S. Army’s innovation missing a key fact—that any one AAR meeting is one part of a self-correcting feedback system for leaders, and not a one-time, postmortem review. Not only is it too late in a postmortem to change the result, the recommendations produced in such meetings are rarely implemented.
The ARC (BAR-Action-AAR) rhythm places “bookends” before and after important units of action (figure 1). Once established as normal practice, BAR and AAR meetings are short and disciplined. The best use is building the cycle into projects and repeating operational activities that will pay back the investment of time in innovation, alignment, and rising standards of performance.
WHAT ARE THE OUTCOMES FROM USING THE ARC?
The local-level outcome is leaders and teams that are agile-minded and empowered in facing change, and ready to achieve their intended results. BARs build the habit of briefly pausing to articulate and align on the plan before going into action. Articulating intent (task, purpose, end state, and metrics) helps sort out means from ends. This in turn builds alignment and enables adaptability. It also sets the stage for the AAR to follow. By comparing intended and actual results in the AAR, assumptions are tested against pragmatic data from execution. Once established, this feedback cycle makes learning inescapable and accountability visible (figure 2).
Figure 1. ARCs Place Bookends Before and After Important Actions
When the ARC is widely adopted throughout a whole organization, the outcome is twofold:
First, a culture of accountability (figure 3). In order to produce this, senior leaders must:
• Vigorously maintain a clear line of sight across levels, from vision through to execution—and back;
• Expect teams to continually improve performance in their core work;
• Assure current data is used by leaders at each level to show intended versus actual results;
• Assure the regularity of leader-led ARCs until they take root—when people see them as unavoidable, momentum shifts.
Second, an agile organization (figure 4). Without an integrative process such as the ARC at the team and interteam level, hiring, training and rewarding individual leaders for agility will not produce an agile organization—such individual-centric approaches may in fact produce gridlock. Organizational agility is an emergent quality arising from building blocks such as discipline around shared understanding of intent and regular candid conversations about results. Such cultural norms undergird the likelihood that aligned, agile action will emerge during periods of crisis or unexpected opportunities.
Figure 2. Action Review Cycle (ARC)
Figure 3. How the ARC Builds a Culture of Accountability
Figure 4. ARCs Shape the Conditions for Organizational Agility to Emerge
HOW DOES THE ARC BUILD CHANGE READINESS AND AGILITY IN AN ORGANIZATION?
In a stable environment, organizations often find that separating the functions of leading, learning, and execution is efficient. However, in today’s turbulent environments, that separation often becomes a barrier to agility because it interferes with accountability and unity of action. The frequency of disciplined BAR and AAR conversations build an orientation toward anticipating and adapting to changing conditions.
The ARC brings leading, learning, and execution together wherever the organization’s work gets done. Gradually, the stovepipes previously separating leading, learning, and execution blur. Leaders lead the learning. Teams learn through execution. Execution within changing conditions becomes a mark of effective leadership and empowered teams. Hubris gives way to humility. Together, these dynamics shape the conditions for organizational agility to emerge—and for the organization to continue to thrive in changing conditions.
Table of Uses
About the Authors
Charles Parry, Mark Pires, and Heidi Sparkes Guber, together with Dave Flanigan, Joe Moore, and Marilyn Darling, pooled their original research on best practices in organizational learning and broad experience leading military, nonprofit, and corporate organizations in order to provide pragmatic support to leaders who are facing the challenge of building their organization’s desire and skill in embracing change—so that organizations can continue to thrive in today’s dynamic environments. Their shared mailbox is [email protected].
Where to Go for More Information
REFERENCES
Darling, Marilyn, D. Meador, and S. Patterson. “Cultivating a Learning Economy: After Action Reviews Generate Ongoing Value for DTE Energy.” Reflections—The SoL Journal on Knowledge, Learning, and Change 5, no. 2 (2003).
Darling, Marilyn, and C. Parry. From Post-Mortem to Living Practice: An In-depth Study of the Evolution of the After Action Review. Boston: SR&C Publications, 2000.
Darling, Marilyn, C. Parry, and J. Moore. “Learning in the Thick of It.” The High Performance Organization (special double issue). Harvard Business Review (July–August 2005).
Parry, Charles, and M. Darling. “Emergent Learning in Action: The After Action Review.” The Systems Thinker (October 2001).
ORGANIZATION
Signet Research & Consulting, LLC—www.signetconsulting.com