One of the most vivid and concrete ways I learned how to be a better football player was watching film after the game with my coaches. It was always a wonderful learning experience with a dash of pain. When I had done things correctly, I might have seen that play a few times on the screen but if I made a mistake, my coach would hit the ten second rewind button repeatedly to drill in my head what I needed to learn.
A short while back I was working with a client and extolling to her the necessary need and high value of Post-Project Reviews, After-Action Reviews, Postmortems, or whatever other term is used. It was a great conversation as this person did not fully realize how valuable these can be and needed some guidance on how to lead one.
After Initiative Reviews are highly valuable but are rarely done or rarely done well in organizations. So, to inspire you to do them, let’s first talk about the WHY to do them:
· Immense learning, insights and improvement can be realized if done well. No need to pay an expensive consultant to tell you what you should already know.
· Your team will actually learn the language of assessment, critical thinking, and continuous improvement.
· These sessions teach team members to be better at reflecting, building self-awareness, giving and receiving feedback, developing a learning continuous improvement mindset – all of these INCREASE Emotional Intelligence without sending them to a training class on EI- which is way more effective.
· Provides closure, and human beings like and need closure. Too often and almost always, teams tend to run from one project to another without giving any thought to the newly completed project. By having the After-Initiative Review, people can mentally “check the project off their list” in an intentional way. This can also stop people from lingering in the past, harboring unhealed wounds while exorcising any negative energy or feelings that might have come about from the project.
· Also, it gives the team some time to do a bit of celebrating (if appropriate) which should be done more often.
7 Keys to Highly Effective After-Action Reviews
1- To ensure a truly productive session, it must be clear that the purpose of the session is ….… immense learning or to learn as much as possible. Setting the stage in this manner will put people in the proper mindset and will go a long way in releasing people’s tendency to be guarded, get defensive, make excuses, deflect or be in denial. If in any way the session comes off as an assessment of individuals, (which should happen in another place and time) the learning will be limited.
2- In the same vein, avoid assigning an overall score to the project when first starting this up. If the task is to come up with some overall score, the attention of the team might go to “padding” the score rather than the learning. As the team gets better and more mature about this process, it is fine to introduce an overall score to the project/initiative.
3- Clearly document with the team what worked well and what did not work well. Be sure not to rush by things that did work well because there is great learning in this too, plus you want to reinforce that effective behavior.
4- Go deep and get specific! Just like all feedback, the more specific you can get the greater the learning will be. If it is concluded that a particular aspect worked well, do not stop there. Dig to understand the things that worked well and why they worked so well. Same with the things that did not work well. Peel that onion.
5- Identify not only the processes but what skills were manifested or missing during the project or initiative. What skills should be worked on in the future, what would we do differently? Hindsight is 20/20, so leverage that reality without beating anyone up. What actions will you immediately take and what work processes need to be changed? What really happened? How did we really perform?
5a- Capture ideas for things to keep doing, ideas for improvement and identify and prioritize the best changes to be made. Make each item something that is tangible and can be “fixed” or implemented in a reasonable amount of time. If there is a ginormous issue, be sure to break it down into steps and commit to one step.
6- Be sure to build time into the project plan so it guarantees this gets done. Don’t skip this process. Even if you cannot do a full-blown session, (which you should,) do something. Also, if the project is particularly long, make sure you do periodic check-ins and reviews to course correct anything earlier on.
7- Flow over Format- There are many templates for a meeting like this, Continue Start Stop, Plus Minus Delta, and some other overly complex methods. Do not complicate this or make it about filling out a form. Use the template to help provide basic structure and flow but the best learning is done with follow-up questions and deeper discovery. Keep it simple and make it about learning and engagement. Your team will get better and better over time if this is done consistently. They will be able to go deeper the more they do this. Thus, more learning, improvements and team effectiveness will prevail. Start and keep on keeping on with the After-Initiative Reviews.