Is military action required for your organization?
Tired of seeing the same mistake repeated over and over? Have you identified the cause? Companies repeat mistakes because either they do not identify what went wrong (lessons learned) or they fail to implement changes so that what went wrong does not occur again.
Inc. magazine, in their March 2009 issue, had an article on how companies are starting to adapt the US Army’s debriefing scheme to improve performance. The military calls these debriefing meetings AARs or after-action reviews
Before the Project
- What are our intended results and how will they be measured?
- What are the risks?
- What do we know or do others know about similar situations?
- What do we think will make the biggest difference fo
r this project?
After the Project
- What were our intended results?
- What were the results?
- What caused our results?
- What will we keep, and what can we improve?
Companies implementing this approach hold a 30 minute meeting that covers the proposed project and asks the questions before implementing the project, in addition to the project stakeholders, anyone who has been on a similar project is invited to contribute.
This approach is very effective for improving performance, but requires management discipline to get the methodology adopted.
