3 Steps to Improve Your Team Debriefs

 

After Action Reviews (AARs) were institutionalized as a practice in the 1970’s by the US military to formalize learning from experience and improve team and unit performance. Their use contributed to significant performance increases, causing this innovation to be rapidly adapted outside the armed forces. But is your organization using them correctly?

 

The AAR was developed as a more participatory alternative to a supervisor driven performance critique. The idea being that by having the critique be driven by team members, rather than a supervisor, a more complete picture of events and interactions can be developed and shared. This shared understanding, in turn, leads to the opportunity to make changes in plans, routines, resources, and interactions, leading to improved performance. The good news is that AAR’s have been shown to improve performance by up to 25%. 

 

But what if your team reviews could be helping you even more? Recent research by Angus Fletcher of the Ohio State University, Preston Cline from the University of Pennsylvania, and Matthew Hoffman of the FBI, conducted in partnership with the US Army Special Forces and described in this article from Harvard Business Review, shows a path forward. 

 

The core strategy they identify is to create greater accountability within the team by developing a clear, shared understanding of what happened. To do this, they advocate 3 steps.

 

1)    Focus on people, not process. Addressing an abstract, impersonal process may feel “safe”, especially early in a team’s life. But that impersonal safety also leads to a lack of passion. Instead, they suggest you personalize the impacts of what happened, and what change could achieve. Do this by focusing on team members, customers, and other stakeholders. Bring their experience and perspectives into the review to highlight the importance of improvement.

2)    Focus more on what happened rather than what could be done. Traditionally, AAR participants spend roughly 25% of the review discussing initial expectations and the instance/performance itself, and 75% of the review focused on the performance gap and what to change. Fletcher, Cline, & Hoffman suggest flipping that ratio to spend much more time ensuring that everyone has a clear, shared sense of what actually happened and that everyone shares their perspective – especially those with divergent points of view. Doing this increases available information, decreases defensiveness, and reduces what psychologists refer as Shared Information Bias. This allow problem areas to be defined with greater clarity and develops a shared focus for creative problem solving later on.

3)    Get clarity and triangulation. Whether someone is claiming credit for a positive outcome, or assigning blame for a negative one, make sure they are clear about how/why “behavior A” led to “outcome B”. What other factors might have influenced the outcome? What other outcomes did this behavior cause? Do others who saw or were present for this behavior agree with this logic?

 

Adding these features to your team debriefs may feel uncomfortable at first, but over time will lead to a greater focus on change and accountability for you and your team.