In this week’s episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser takes a look at how to conduct an effective after-action process – or you may call it a Lessons Learned process at your organization.

At Bryghtpath, we believe an effective after-action process is a critical component of learning from a crisis or disruption – enabling you to continue to mature your program and improve preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery for future situations.

Topics discussed include the “hot wash”, structuring your after-action process, meetings, and surveys, leading discussions with survivors and those impacted by a crisis or disruption, and assembling an after-action report.

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and CEO at Bryghtpath, and hey, I wanted to start off by pointing out that this is our 50th episode of this podcast, and I know we’ve had some inconsistencies in the past in terms of delivering the podcast on a weekly basis, but so far in 2019, we’ve been quite consistent with that, but I just wanted to thank everyone who listens for your support, your encouragement, your comments, and feedback, both good and critical.

All of that helps us be better, but welcome to our 50th episode.

We’re going to be talking about how to conduct an effective after action report or AAR, or sometimes called a lessons learned document.

I just want to start off with some basic philosophy before we get into some of the nuts and bolts about how to do this effectively. My philosophy kind of revolves around four things when it comes to after action reports, and they all have to do with you as the leader and your approach to how you manage this process. It starts with understanding that every crisis situation, every incident that you have is a learning opportunity. It’s a learning opportunity to be better the next time around. That’s the principle reason we do after-action discussions and reports are to understand what worked, what didn’t go so well, and how do we want to improve next time around.

I would tell you based on my personal experience, I’m a pretty good crisis manager. Over time at my previous employer, we built a fantastic team and we dealt with some really difficult and emotional situations around the world. Every single time, even when everything went well from we had good results and nobody got hurt or injured or killed. We got great feedback from the business and we felt like we were clicking on all cylinders, we still had a ton of things that we felt we could do better, and that’s how you get to be good.

That’s how you build a mature and sustainable process for your organization. So, you’ve got to view every one of these incidents or crisis situations as a learning opportunity, a chance to get better.

The second is that you as a leader as you go through this after action process, you’ve got to be comfortable accepting and seeking constructive criticism because even your best folks, even when you do everything, it feels like you’ve done everything right, you can always be better. And so, there are things that you’ll learn during the after-action process that might come across as a little critical, but the point is that these are things that we see that can help you be better. And so, be comfortable seeking that constructive criticism.

The second is as the leader, the best way to do these is to ask a lot of open-ended questions. What are the questions that you want to ask? They should be ones that allow free form answers. You want the folks that you’re seeking their opinion about what went well and what could’ve gone better,