Introduction: The AAR’s major contribution comes from the discipline its use instills in the workforce.
It enables the workforce to deliver rigorous, dispassionate reviews of efforts, and to focus on capturing the lessons that can be learned.
The goal is to learn immediately by receiving feedback while it is still fresh from everyone who is involved in, or affected by an effort.
There are several aspects of a solid AAR effort:
- The boss needs to be kept in the loop
- Use an impartial facilitator to keep the review on task and professional
- Include everyone who is involved in or affected by the action
- Hold reviews in a timely fashion
The people doing the work review the results of their efforts with their manager or some other leader (bosses need to be kept in the loop).
It is wise to use a facilitator, and it is most effective if the person who serves in this role is dispassionate.
It is very important that everyone engaged in the review process is free to speak truth to power (criticize the actions of the boss, or others who hold higher positions in the organization). Therefore, the facilitator should hold a position within the company that is senior enough to ensure that their support will enable the lowest level worker involved to be able to speak freely and truthfully, especially when the truth may involve constructive feedback that is difficult for a boss to hear.
It is very important that everyone is free to admit mistakes and have discussions that allow true learning to take place, rather than having blame and recrimination be the result. An impartial facilitator serves to keep the discussion on a professional and constructive, rather than personal and recriminatory, level.
And, it is best to have a facilitator who comes from a different team or functional area than the team holding the review. This insures a broad analysis of the action being reviewed, that isn’t limited by the bias that can be present in one group’s perspective.
An additional benefit of using facilitators is that this is an important skill for people to have, and rotating this responsibility among individuals, and between areas, serves a developmental need of the organization; facilitation is a teachable/learnable skill.
Please note: We do not mandate the use of a facilitator who is separate from the team responsible for the action and it’s review process. We don’t support adding any unnecessary levels of effort, or complications, to what can be a very simple and customary process.
It may be that for day-to-day actions, a team leader can function as the facilitator, depending on their skill at facilitation and the nature of the debriefing. However, when emotions run high, when the lessons are particularly difficult, when the actions are critical to the company’s success instead of being an everyday, business-as-usual sort of occurrence, when triggering events indicate a serious crisis, or when a team leader is new to the process and learning the role, an absolutely impartial facilitator becomes necessary for success, and under these sorts of conditions, it is best to pull this person from a different area than the team holding the review process.
It also is important to involve everyone who is appropriate in the review process. While a particular action may be the responsibility of one group or team, there will be internal customers, suppliers and others who are involved in or affected by the outcomes of the action. These people are close to the work, and their input serves to ensure the broadest and least biased analysis possible.
Lastly, the review should take place in a timely fashion, as close as possible in time and space to when and where the action took place. This insures that everyone’s feedback is fresh and accurate, rather than being stale and distorted by the passage of time and other actions, or distractions.