FACE TO FACE
Getting Better at Getting Better—How the After Action Really Review Works: An Interview with Marilyn Darling

In 1989 Marilyn Darling founded Signet Consulting Group to conduct research and consulting in strategies for corporate learning. With her business partner, Charles Parry, she has evolved a practice called "emergent learning," that is, learning about your own work in the course of doing your work. About eight years ago, Marilyn was introduced to the After Action Review (AAR), the U.S. Army's learning practice that allows soldiers to extract lessons from one situation and apply them to another. Recognizing the AAR as "emergent learning on the ground," she has since incorporated the method into helping individuals and organizations raise the level of learning in their own work processes.

At the 2005 Pegasus Conference, Marilyn and Lieutenant Colonel Mark Pires (ret.) will be conducting a one-day pre-conference session, in which participants will learn and apply the tools of the AAR process to their work challenges (learn more about the conference). In the following interview, conducted by Leverage Points editor Kali Saposnick, Marilyn describes the challenges and benefits of transferring what we learn from one project to the next and how AARs empower that process.

Leverage Points: What is the After Action Review process, and why would organizations benefit from using it in their work?

Marilyn Darling: An After Action Review (AAR) is a tool for continually improving your results by discovering and applying lessons before, during, and after a project, and for applying those lessons to similar projects in the future. Many people believe that the main purpose of AARs is to capture lessons for the benefit of other teams. But our belief is that the team itself is the first, best customer for what it is learning, and the best time to apply "lessons learned" is in the current project itself. What a shame to wait until the end of a project to hold an AAR and gain an insight that might have helped improve the results of that project!

LP: What is the first step in using AARs?

MD: You first have to figure out what part of your business you want to improve. One of the key reasons people misunderstand the After Action Review is because its name is misleading—it seems to assume that you do your learning after action is completed. In fact, you really learn when, at the beginning of a piece of action, you create a plan for testing out an idea and seeing if it works.

The real AAR process is a cycle, what we call the arc of learning. It involves a leader and his or her team asking at various stages of a project: What is the work that we do that we need to improve in order to produce the kind of results we want? Each time we begin that work, can we create a hypothesis about what will make us successful this time? Can we collectively try out this hypothesis and do an AAR at the end to ask: What was our intent? Did we actually accomplish it? What caused our results? What can we sustain? What can we improve?

Read the complete interview

Learn more about the 2005 Pegasus Conference

Explore additional resources on team learning by Marilyn Darling

PEGASUS CONFERENCE CORNER
15th Annual Pegasus Conference
Embracing Interdependence: Effective and Responsible Action in Our Organizations and the World
San Francisco, California, November 14–16, 2005

Margaret Wheatley to Speak at Author's Night

We are pleased to announce that Margaret Wheatley, author, teacher, and innovative thinker, will be presenting at Author's Night at the 2005 Pegasus Conference. Join Wheatley in a talk about her most recent book, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time (Berrett-Koehler, 2005). In this work, she richly articulates how the insights of modern science—as well as those from primal wisdom traditions, indigenous tribes, spiritual thought, and poets old and new—can usher in a new era of human and planetary health. The event will be held on Tuesday night of the conference, November 15, and is open to the public.

Register by June 27 to Save $500
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LEARNING LINKS
Making Change Happen in Your Organization
by Barry Dym and Harry Hutson

Why do some change efforts happen easily with little strategy, while others meet unexpected and crippling resistance despite brilliant planning? Based on conversations with employees involved in successful interventions, we conclude that people and organizations will use whatever resources are available to them to change—rapidly, strongly, and thoroughly—only when they're "ready."

Good timing—knowing what kind of intervention fits the distinctive needs and climate of an organization at a particular time—is especially vital when introducing change strategies. We believe good timing can be learned, and we teach it by dividing readiness into three distinct and familiar "states," each requiring specific kinds of interventions.

1) Forays. No matter how bureaucratically organized a system is, there are always people trying to improve things. Learn to identify and help grow these efforts, using the momentum of people's own energies.

(2) Responsive States of Readiness. When people feel curious, receptive, urgency, or determined, they will essentially invite you to facilitate change. If they do ask you to solve a problem they've just identified, be decisive in your recommendations and offer necessary technical assistance.

(3) Unstable States of Readiness. Individuals and groups whose lives are disrupted by disequilibrium in the system find themselves confused and helpless. They reach out for almost any way to get oriented. By timing interventions to unstable states, we substantially increase their chances of success.

This three-fold categorization gives us options, by allowing us to design interventions with specific states of readiness in mind. If an intervention shows signs of failure, we can look to the other states for guidance. Doing so transforms the development of change strategies from guesswork into an empirical process.

Read the complete article on which this summary is based, or see LEVERAGE, No. 14 (July 27, 1998)

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