After-action reviews

It wouldn’t be a “normal” market cycle without some abnormalities. Rare is the time when we’re trucking along without any potholes, detours or traffic stops. But it’s those challenging times that often spark our best solutions.

I know many of you growing fresh produce have experienced your share of challenges during the last couple of years. But have you taken the time to perform an after-action review (AAR) and address those breakdowns?

Wharton Executive Education teaches this strategy, which was developed by the United States Army. Wharton educators call it “a simple, yet powerful tool” that creates “a culture of continuous performance improvement and adaptive learning by systematically reviewing team successes and failures.”

The AAR is an active discussion centered around 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)? Why did it happen that way (why was there a difference between strategy and execution)? What will we do to adapt our strategy or refine our execution for a better outcome OR how do we repeat our success? (While we’re talking about learning from challenges and failures, the AAR is an effective tool for understanding and repeating wins, too!)

Before enacting the AAR, gather your team and make sure you’re fostering a climate of transparency. If everyone doesn’t openly share how their actions may have contributed to a failure, the AAR is ineffective. Once you’re ready, follow these action steps:

Schedule AARs consistently to learn from both successes and failures. “Post-mortems” discourage participation and enthusiasm. AARs should be held during or immediately after successful and non-successful events, using the positive positioning of improving your own performance and not that of someone else.

Gather relevant facts and figures related to the team’s performance. Present facts that are grounded in relevant data.

Make participation mandatory and involve all team members — even customers, partners and suppliers can be included. Each participant will likely have a different perspective on the event, and this serves as a key input into the AAR.

Have a three-pronged focus: performance of team members, the leader and the team. Keeping the attention on facts and outcomes, what are the strengths and weaknesses of each? This focus keeps the discussion centered on what the team can control.

Follow the “rules of engagement.” To encourage honest participation and mutual trust, AARs must be confidential (joint learning is shared, but individual comments are not), transparent, focused on individual and team improvement and development and in preparation for “next time.”

Share learning across the organization. Many organizations, including Huber and Microsoft, use databases or blogs to make the lessons of AARs available via intranet to all of their teams. It’s inefficient to withhold key learnings from other teams and allow them to make the same mistakes or prevent them from replicating best practices.