Before Action and After Action Reviews: One of my favorite leadership development methods
Randall Smith | July 2022
This is an excerpt from Breadth and Depth, the PowerLabs newsletter. Sign up below to get the next edition in your inbox.
I’m on family vacation this week and re-reading Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision.
Baker declared that “Strong people don’t need a strong leader.” As her biographer Barbara Ransby said:
[Baker warned] activists to eschew messiahs and saviors and build local leaders by the thousands. “Martin didn’t make the movement,” she said. Rather, “the movement made Martin.” She did not mean this to be a disparaging assessment but a hopeful one. The strength and determination of ordinary people and the power of the organizations they build together are the locus of the power that fuels change, power that is bigger than any one individual, no matter how charismatic or committed.
I first read the biography when it was published almost 20 years ago, and the lessons in the book are even more relevant now. I’ll save my spicy take on why and share one of my favorite leadership development methods instead.
One of the ways we can create strong people is by creating the space for people to reflect on their participation and draw lessons from it.
A pluses and deltas evaluation is ok at this, but there’s an even better method called Before Action and After Action Reviews.
After Action Reviews (AARs) is a process developed by the US military to involve every soldier in learning and improving their unit. The AAR method goes deeper than pluses and deltas with four simple (and powerful) questions.
What is our intended result?
What were our actual results?
What caused our results?
What lessons should we take forward for next time?
The process should be run at the end of the project for sure. But it’s even more effective when it’s run during a project when course corrections are still possible.
Research has found that teams are inclined to assess their strategy at the calendar midpoint of a project, making it a natural time to run an AAR.
If conditions are changing quickly, AARs can be run on a daily or weekly cadence. For example, I worked with an organization running a deep canvass pilot where the team needed to learn fast enough to achieve the program’s objectives. Instead of waiting to till the project mid-point, they held daily and weekly AARs.
The Before Action Review is the other side of the pair. It can be held at the beginning of a project, at each new phase of a project and after an AAR. The five questions are:
What is our intended result?
What are our success measures?
What challenges will we face?
What did we learn from last time?
What do we think will make us successful this time?
Get detailed instructions on running Before Action and After Reviews on pages 5–9 of this pdf.
When we choose to set aside time for reflection, we’re creating the conditions for people to develop their:
Knowledge — Information or understanding gained from experience or education
Skills — The ability to do something that comes from training, experience, or practice
Wisdom — The ability to contemplate and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight.
Each time someone participates in the BAR/AAR process, they become, in Baker’s words, a stronger person.
If you want to learn more leadership development methods like this, join the We’re a Nerdy Movement Study Group.
It’s a six-week program for people who want to build high-participation people-powered campaigns through evidence-based approaches. When you join the group, you’ll learn:
how to make the recruitment and retention of members or volunteers more effective,
how to make it more likely that teams produce excellent work and get stronger over time,
how to increase people’s commitment, leadership capacity, and ability to act in the face of uncertainty, and
other practices that develop leaders and build the power of your organization.
Learn more about the study group.