Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Why don’t we do AARs at work on a regular basis?

AAR isn’t just a sound that your favorite pirate makes when he runs out of whisky.  It stands for After-Action Report, and it is what the busi­ness world calls “Lessons Learned.”  How­ever, the term lessons learned is some­times a bit too pre­sump­tu­ous — are the lessons really learned?  Bet­ter yet, are the lessons even really captured?

The busi­ness world takes a lot of its lessons, think­ing pat­terns, and con­cepts from the mil­i­tary.   There’s a rea­son for this: there is no less for­giv­ing envi­ron­ment then that of human war­fare.  Busi­ness isn’t much friend­lier some­times, but at least it isn’t lit­er­ally about life and death.

Still, the lessons from the world of sweat, bul­lets and blood aren’t ported over com­pletely or suc­cess­fully.  Let’s look at the AAR or lessons-learned, for example.

I hap­pen to be read­ing a book by Lt. Gen. (ret) Moore and Joseph Gal­loway titled We Are Sol­diers Still.  It is a follow-on to their eye-opening book We Were Sol­diers Once … And Young.  Both books cen­ter around the events and expe­ri­ences in the Ia Drang Val­ley in 1965, just as Amer­ica was begin­ning its direct involve­ment in the conflict.

Phuong told us […] he was about three miles away from the bat­tle­field.  He could see the smoke and hear the artillery and air strikes.  I asked if he then moved toward the fight­ing.  He grinnned and replied: “Oh no!  I went in the oppo­site direc­tion.”  Phoung told us that the North Veit­namese drew valu­able lessons from the Ia Drang, lessons that they applied, with flex­i­bil­ity, through­out the rest of the report.  Phuong’s report, writ­ten in the imme­di­atcy of the moment after he had inter­viewed the sur­viv­ing North Viet­namese com­man­ders, was printed as a small pam­phlet and quickly dis­sem­i­nated to the NVA and Viet Cong troops.  It was titled sim­ply: “How to Fight the Americans.”

Think about this — the North Viet­namese had just fought a bloody 4-day bat­tle with the Amer­i­cans.  Both sides got their noses blood­ied, both sides fought valiantly, both sides were in it for keeps.  But what hap­pened right after the battle?

He told us that the sur­viv­ing North Viet­namese com­man­ders gath­ered after the fight and together they went over each action in the bat­tles and the lessons that should be learned from them.

They got together to fig­ure out the right lessons to learn, doc­u­mented them, and then quickly dis­tilled them down to the basics and com­mu­ni­cated them out to the field com­man­ders.  They reviewed what hap­pened, learned how to do bet­ter, and made sure every­one else on the line learned the lessons.

Why doesn’t this hap­pen more often in the work­place?  Yes, the Project Man­age­ment Insti­tute (PMI) is big on lessons-learned and review­ing pre­vi­ous lessons learned.  Yes, big exer­cises in the emer­gency man­age­ment field have “hot-washes” (who came up with that ridicu­lous term?) and lessons-learned doc­u­ments.  But are they really focused, earnest ses­sions where par­tic­i­pants — espe­cially the lead­ers — try to learn and inter­nal­ize the key lessons?  And are these lessons effec­tively com­mu­ni­cated and inter­nal­ized by oth­ers in the organization?

I don’t have any answers here right now.  I was just read­ing through the book and this nag­ging thought just kept gnaw­ing at me.  Why do most busi­nesses and orga­ni­za­tions suck so badly at learn­ing lessons that they’ve already paid for?

More impor­tantly, how can we do bet­ter?  How can we learn fast and com­mu­ni­cate it fast?  How can we learn fast like the peo­ple who beat the world’s most tech­no­log­i­cally advanced army with peas­ant sol­diers?  How can we learn to accom­plish our objec­tives, using AAR as a tool for improve­ment rather than the sound we make as we stum­ble along like drunken pirates?

Maybe you’ve got some thoughts on this.  I’d like to hear them.