Every Error is an Opportunity

Finding Opportunity in Mistakes

After Action Reviews (AARs) are a powerful tool for assessing why operations or activities succeeded or failed, but only if supported by institutional trust. Many organizations have adopted After Action Reviews (AARs) with the intent of increasing performance and efficiency, and they can be incredibly helpful in determining future courses of action, refining processes, and enhancing inter-operational relationships. Unfortunately, many organizations fail to capitalize on the opportunities AARs offer. Why is this? Frequently, it is because participants are unwilling to openly share their individual mistakes and critiques of others, making it difficult for lessons to be identified that will benefit the organization broadly.

Although simple in form, successful AAR execution requires significant and thoughtful planning. Central to their success, AARs require significant interpersonal skill on behalf of the facilitator guiding the conversation. They also require trust amongst participants, and while a good facilitator can build trust, that is often not enough. If the facilitator is working against an organizational culture struggling with trust issues, it will be an uphill battle plagued by an inability to explore the hard questions.

There are numerous reasons why people don’t want to admit mistakes or point out the performance failures of their team. These include lack of confidence, fear of judgment, an unwillingness to be vulnerable in front of colleagues, and pride. Although individual personalities vary, all operate better in an environment high in trust. Deliberate efforts to create a trusting work environment will produce better AARs and, in turn, well conducted AARs can contribute to a work environment higher in trust.

Where AARs Came From

According to the Army Research Institute, AARs were established by the United States Army in the 1970s to provide performance feedback from training exercises and stemmed from two primary sources: interviews after combat and performance critiques. The lessons learned from interviews after combat highlighted what would become a key aspect of a successful AAR: guided discussion through leading questions to uncover what happened during an operation from multiple individual perspectives. Performance critiques, however, carried a characteristic of what hinders so many attempts at AARs across organizations today . Performance critiques focused almost exclusively on errors made and treated the soldiers as members of an audience, rather than participants. Negative environments create a lack of trust, which leads to resistance to sharing even when an opportunity is given.

Organizations that work in high consequence environments, such as pilots and surgeons, have recognized the same characteristics required of AARs are not only of benefit to future development, but can be employed in real time to enhance performance. During the 1970s, the airline industry and NASA realized the majority of airline accidents were caused by human error and developed Crew Resource Management (CRM) techniques focused on communication, teamwork, and decision making. Similarly, surgical teams recognized that surgical complications are predominantly caused by communication failures and created post-surgical debriefings to identify and remove obstacles to communication. Post-surgical debriefings drew from the concepts fundamental to both AARs and CRM.

There can be tremendous consequences in decision-making environments in which employees, managers, and leaders don’t have open conversation or mechanisms by which to provide feedback in a psychologically safe way. In 2015, Volkswagen admitted that engineers had cheated on emissions tests, which ultimately cost the company more than $30 billion. The cultural demands of performance expectations regardless of cost arguably played a role. Then head of the Volkswagen Works Council, Bernd Osterloh wrote “We need in the future a climate in which problems aren’t hidden but can be openly communicated to superiors.”

What I’ve Learned

We were gathered in a circle after a long, uncomfortable training session, dusty and ready to be done for the day. I was a fairly new team leader at the Hostage Rescue Team and was in the company of the other two teams in my unit. Our unit, which had just been recommissioned after an organizational shift to meet mission demands, had a heavier than normal ratio of colleagues fresh out of new operator training. Albeit new to the Hostage Rescue Team, these new operators were all seasoned military professionals who had put in their time as FBI special agents before joining.

I listened as a seasoned operator kicked off the AAR. It started well enough, but quickly moved into very personal critiques. I tried to redirect the conversation with a critical observation of my own performance but failed. We were too new as a unit, the critiques more about personal failures than opportunities for unit growth, and there was not enough trust yet to overcome this. I watched as many of my teammates shut down, not finding value in this approach, which kept us from identifying points that could be elevated to unit-level learning. Even strong cultures can fall prey to individual personalities and less than thoughtful facilitation. Often, the implications of a more formal and hierarchical organization are outsized impact of everything a leader does or fails to do. It took us time and effort to develop the trust necessary to leverage good AARs.

The best AARs I have seen were with military Special Operations Forces. Their ability to have brutally honest and direct conversation about what went right and wrong, who did what and why, and what should be done about it, was as impressive as their ability to seemingly flip a switch post-AAR and walk off to get a beer together. This stood in stark contrast to the fractured levels of participation I sometimes experienced in other places. How did the Special Operations Forces conduct AARs so consistently? Through extraordinary levels of trust. This trust was built through both the reliance on colleagues necessary to conduct such work as well as the cultural expectations that had been baked in from employee selection through training and into deployment.

The AARs I have seen done well were successful because the participants included all important stakeholders and the facilitator created a climate of trust while guiding the conversation past surface observations into the individual perspectives that led to decisions and actions. This level of sharing led to discoveries of what was causative as opposed to correlative and progress in improving processes, operations, and communications.

What You Can Do

It can be challenging for leaders to extract themselves from controlling discussions meant for the development of their team, and sometimes more challenging to participate in the process as a participant and not the leader. Nonetheless, it is essential to hand the reins over to a facilitator not involved in the operation or effort being reviewed. Creating a psychologically safe space for participation is foundational in drawing observations and opinions out of your team that are truly useful, and few actions set that tone better than aligning yourself among the participants rather than the reviewers. Here are some other thoughts:

• Look for opportunities to contribute comments regarding areas you have identified for self-improvement early in the review. A leader who is confident enough to be self-reflective in front of their direct reports creates an example that is easy to follow.

• If you recognize that open communication and respectful disagreement are inhibited by any of the participants, including mid-level managers or team leaders, politely but firmly step in with reminders as to the intent of the AAR. An AAR should focus on team performance and identifying areas for improvement, not placing blame on individuals. Ensure you hand the reigns back to the facilitator.

• Include as many stakeholders as possible. It can be uncomfortable to point out where we think we (or someone else) could have done better, and discomfort can grow with the size of the group. However, the value of the review can also grow with the diversity of the participants. When I saw a willingness to hold honest reviews with and in front of partner agencies the results were exceptional.

• Hold AARs as soon as practicable after the event to be reviewed and assign action officers for further development of key observations or solutions that come out of the conversation. Nothing helps to ingrain a process into the culture of an organization better than seeing results.

• Use the AAR as an opportunity to assess the level of trust across your organization. It takes trusting environments for participants to share where they feel they could improve and for them to be willing to point out mistakes or errors made by others. In high-trust environments, participants are receptive to the observations and feedback of others, even if they disagree, and are willing to engage in deeper discussion looking for ways to improve without being defensive.

Be honest with yourself if you are not getting full value from your AARs. It may not be the facilitator’s approach and could reflect the day-to-day level of trust in your organization. This is an opportunity to see where trust breaks down: within a team, between work units, between employees and managers, and so on.

New Chapters

I have been a student of leadership and a practitioner of crisis management, high-reliability team building, and the development of organizational culture for many years, especially in the latter half of my career. I have found that writing and speaking about these topics continues to broaden and refine my thinking, and therefore my contributions. The Creating Culture newsletter is intended to be an exercise in studying, discussing, and sharing thoughts on topics important to building better teams and stronger organizations. Whether you and your organization are looking to prepare for the unexpected or seize new opportunities, I hope you’ll join me.

Click here to subscribe.