After Action Review

What an After Action Review is

An After Action Review (مراجعة ما بعد الحدث, abbreviated AAR) is a short, structured meeting that a team holds after an activity, a task or a project, in order to compare what was intended with what actually happened and to draw out what to continue and what to change next time. Secondary sources attribute the practice to the United States Army, and state that it developed the practice in the 1970s as a training tool, after which it moved to civilian organisations, to hospitals and to project teams.

The review is a management practice that an organisation chooses to adopt. It is not an inquiry into anyone’s responsibility, it is not an assessment of an employee, it is not a procedure prescribed by a legal text, and it does not report that it raises the performance of teams.

Where the practice comes from and what its sources are

We checked the following works in Crossref. The records show that the works exist, and they do not show what the works contain:

• Darling and Parry. The article “After Action Reviews: Linking Reflection and Planning in a Learning Practice” in Reflections: The SoL Journal, volume 3, issue 2, 2001, pages 64 to 72.
• Meliza and Goldberg. The chapter “Impact of After Action Review on Learning in Simulation Based U.S. Army Training” in the book “Assessment of Problem Solving Using Simulations”, 2017, pages 255 to 272.
• Sawyer and Deering. The article “Adaptation of the US Army’s After Action Review for Simulation Debriefing in Healthcare” in Simulation in Healthcare, volume 8, issue 6, 2013, pages 388 to 397.
• Tannenbaum and Cerasoli. The article “Do Team and Individual Debriefs Enhance Performance? A Meta Analysis” in Human Factors, volume 55, issue 1, pages 231 to 245.
• Allen, Reiter Palmon, Crowe and Scott. The article “Debriefs: Teams learning from doing in context” in American Psychologist, volume 73, issue 4, 2018, pages 504 to 516.
• Keiser and Arthur. The article “A meta analysis of the effectiveness of the after action review (or debrief) and factors that influence its effectiveness” in the Journal of Applied Psychology, volume 106, issue 7, 2021, pages 1007 to 1032.

A web search also turned up a report by Morrison and Meliza titled “Foundations of the After Action Review Process”, attributed to the United States Army Research Institute in 1999. We could not open it and did not find it in Crossref, so we adopt nothing from it. What we describe of the questions and the style of running a review is a summary in our own words of what secondary summaries pass on, which vary in detail, and we did not see the text of any of the six works.

The questions the review is built on

Secondary sources summarise the circulating form in 4 questions, with small differences of wording from one source to another:

• What was supposed to happen? The goal and the plan are described again as they stood before the activity, and not as they are remembered after it.
• What actually happened? What occurred is told through facts that can be pinned down, and those who were in the field take part, not the team leader alone.
• Why did the two differ? Causes are sought in conditions, decisions and information, and no person is sought to whom the difference is credited.
• What do we continue, and what do we change? The team produces specific steps that can be put back to the team in a later review.

The summaries state that the review is held soon after the activity ends so that details do not fade, and that the person who runs it can be a facilitator who puts the questions and does not pass judgement on the answers. The purpose is described as the learning of the team from its work, and that is a description of the intention of the practice and not a testimony to its effect.

How the review differs from nearby concepts

• Incident investigation. A structured examination after an accident at work to find out what happened, why, and what would prevent its repetition is detailed under incident investigation. The review is held after a planned activity, and the activity may have gone as intended.
• Group learning through questions. A small group in which each member brings a real problem and the others assist with questions is the concern of action learning. It turns toward a problem not yet solved, and the review turns toward an activity that has ended.
• Reflection on experience. Learning from experience through reflection that follows the experience and conceptualisation that follows the reflection is described in the Kolb experiential learning cycle. The review can be read as a means of organising the stage of reflection, and that is a pairing we make from the two sources, not text in either.
• Individual feedback. Giving an employee comments on work close to the event and at regular intervals is the matter addressed by continuous feedback. That is a relationship between a manager and an employee, whereas the review is a pause by a team over a shared activity.
• Corrective action. A managerial step to address a shortfall in performance, described by what is required, who does it and by what deadline, is the topic of corrective action. The review yields lessons and steps that the team proposes, and does not by that alone yield a managerial decision against anyone.

A hypothetical example: a review after a project of 12 tasks

Take a hypothetical team of 6 people that finished a project of 12 tasks. The tasks delivered on time were 8, those delivered late were 3 and those not completed were 1, which total 8 + 3 + 1 = 12. The share on time is 8 ÷ 12 = 67% approximately, the late share is 3 ÷ 12 = 25% and the share not completed is 1 ÷ 12 = 8%, and together they come to 100%.

A review of 45 minutes was then held, divided across the four questions: 10 minutes for what was supposed to happen, 10 minutes for what happened, 15 minutes for the causes and 10 minutes for what to change, a total of 45. Its cost in team time is 6 × 45 = 270 minutes, which is 4.5 working hours. In the question on causes it emerged that the 4 tasks that missed the date fell under 3 causes: two tasks waited for approval from another department, one task had no clear owner, and one task had been estimated at less time than it needed. The total is 2 + 1 + 1 = 4.

The team came out with steps: to request the approvals that can be foreseen at the start of the project, to write the name of an owner on every task, and to add a margin of time for new tasks. The figures are hypothetical and were set to illustrate. They do not represent a team or a study. The example does not say that the next project will meet its date, because the review, as defined, is a pause for learning and not a guarantee.

After a later project of 10 tasks, 8 were delivered on time, which is 8 ÷ 10 = 80% against 67% in the first project, a difference of 13 points. The difference is not credited to the review, because the two projects differ in size and tasks and perhaps in the experience of the team. What helps with follow up is to ask the team which of the three steps were applied and which were neglected.

How a review is run in practice

The guidance that follows is ours, based on the description in the summaries, and it is not text in a source to which we refer. The review is held after the activity and close to it, and those who actually took part attend. It is preferable that the discussion be run by someone who puts the questions and does not decide the outcome. At its end, what has been agreed is written as steps: what changes, who takes it up, and when it will be looked at. The lessons are recorded in a place that other teams reach, and otherwise they stay with their own team alone.

The limits of the practice

• Dependence on frankness. The belief of an employee that he or she can admit a mistake without being counted against is set out in psychological safety. In our estimate, a review in which the participants fear blame yields curt answers.
• Lessons without follow up. Steps that no one asks about after the review remain talk, and the practice as such contains no mechanism of follow up.
• Memory and bias after the result has occurred. Someone who knows the result may rearrange the facts so as to explain it. It is our view that drawing on records written at the time of the activity softens this.
• A Saudi context not examined. We know of no Saudi study that we adopt on the practice in Saudi organisations.

How the review is misused

• Turning it into a trial. In the description of the summaries the review looks for the causes of a difference and not for a person responsible for it.
• Holding it only after a failure. A successful activity holds something whose cause is worth knowing, and that is a view of ours.
• Mixing it with the assessment of individual performance. Its subject is the shared activity and not the grade of an employee.
• Copying it unchanged from a military setting. We judge that a difference in team and in risk calls for adapting the form, which is what the title of the article by Sawyer and Deering on hospitals shows.

The role of human resources

Human resources is in a position to propose the form and to train managers to run it with questions and not with verdicts, and to gather the lessons that recur across teams and put them to whoever holds the decision. What changes in the work plan stays with the owners of the project, and human resources takes part through its knowledge of roles and training and not by fixing the outcome.

What the sources allow us to say

We do not state that the review raises the performance of teams or improves the results of projects, or that a team that holds it learns more than another. We did not read the two meta analyses recorded in Crossref or any other work in the list, and in the sources we reviewed we found no Saudi study that we adopt, so we attribute to a source neither an effect nor a figure.

The better course is to treat the practice as a structured pause for comparing what was intended with what is real, and to judge it by what appears in the organisation: whether the steps that were agreed have been carried out, and whether the same causes recur less in the projects that follow. What is decided after that depends on the nature of the work and of the team.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.