After-Action Reviews: A Guide for Reflection

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Is your agency conducting After-Action Reviews (AARs) on a routine basis? Are you collecting the best practices, lessons learned, and retaining and sharing them for others? 

If not, your agency may be missing a huge opportunity in knowledge collection and retention. AARs can also be an important part of your leadership, including command staff doing it together. 

AARs, based on the military's post-battle or training group debriefs, are structured post-event critiques or reflections that enable participants to debrief on what occurred and what went well—and what did not go well. These are non-judgmental, but rather are fact-based observations to better enable and execute future operations. 


The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has published a two-page AAR guide that is used to train and debrief fire crews. The resource has three primary elements: (1) AAR purpose; (2) process overview; and (3) facilitator considerations. The guide defines AAR as a post-event process to identify “timely lessons by comparing intentions with outcomes.” An AAR is designed to cull out what worked well and where improvements could be made, specifically by identifying root causes so they can be followed-up later. The guide includes specialized areas to address with the fire crews, but these can be adapted to any team effort. 

Why it matters for leaders

Police executives and organizations must incorporate continuous data collection and analysis into their thinking, planning, and strategy (Heifetz, et. al., 2009).  One major component of data analysis is conducting “post-mortems” or post-event reviews. While AARs are especially critical when something goes wrong, it should also be one constantly -- it can be incorporated into the most daily of tasks -- taking ten minutes to do an AAR will help performance and reflection, two crucial components of leading. Heifetz and his colleagues underscore that “when something bad happens (a client is lost, a bid is rejected) the news is acknowledged [for what it is] and the event is debriefed for its lessons, not treated as a cause for punishment” (p. 106).  AARs are not about blame or discipline, but rather to surface what happened, why, what worked, and what didn't in a clear, straightforward, fact-based way. 

AARs demonstrate the need for reflection and processing that is important to gain a deeper understanding of what occurred and why, as well as to encourage sharing various perspectives: “executives [must] encourage pure reflection as well as [instill a] more disciplined process[] of complex dynamic situations…” (p. 106). Given today's environment, AARs are an excellent way to bring those learning points to the surface and begin to think critically about what we are doing and how we can do it better, differently, or enhance them.

Five questions for an AAR

The AAR guide is designed to facilitate a group discussion on the event immediately after it has occurred and to delve into what contributed to successes and failures. There are five key questions that the guide describes as being essential to the concept:

1. What did [each participant] intend [to do]?

2. What actually happened?

3. What can [each participant] learn about why it [the actual course of events] happened?

4. What would [each participant] do next time?

5. What will [each participant] do now [to prepare for the next event]?

The guide also provides excellent suggestions for group facilitators. This includes: focusing on the events, not personalities or people; staying on the main issues, not spending time on trivial or insignificant factors; discussing any “elephant in the room” and calling it out; and using the results for future improvement, not as the basis for punishment. 

AARs for daily use

Why not start using AARs for small, daily events to build up the culture of reflection? With this guide, leaders can be more effective in the manner they conduct an AAR. The results will likely be very useful to leaders at all levels, as well as the team itself.  Leaders can use the guide and the AAR process to help create the context and communicate the expectations, process, and ground rules. The ultimate goal is to facilitate a discussion that identifies areas of strengths, deficits, and process improvement opportunities. Regardless of the event or issue, AARs can be a great way for leaders to enhance inter-team dialogue and get more feedback on the operations they oversee. It can help make adjustments to deliver a better outcome, and also instill the leader’s commitment to non-judgmental self-critique and continuous improvement. 



Heifetz, R. A., Linsky, M., & Grashow, A. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership: Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

U.S. Forest Service. (2006, January). After action reviews. https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5394559.pdf

Photos: US Army, and Federal Bureau of Investigation

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