After-Action Review
Updated 2026-09-10
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
The After-Action Review is a lightweight debriefing routine, widely adopted from US Army practice, in which a team answers four questions immediately after an action: what did we intend, what happened, why the difference, and what will we change. The core proposition is cadence over ceremony, since many small immediate reviews compound faster than one annual retrospective. The key qualification is that the review must be non-punitive, because any hint of accountability for errors converts honest reporting into impression management and destroys the input the method depends on.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Immediate loop: close every action with a short comparison of intent against actual result. - Blame separation: state explicitly that the session exists for learning, never for evaluation. - Single change: leave with one concrete adjustment rather than a list of good intentions.
Anchor fast decisions
Learning decays with delay because the reasoning behind a decision becomes unrecoverable within days. A short review held immediately captures the counterfactual while it is still available, and its brevity keeps the cost low enough to run after every event rather than only after failures. Frequent small corrections prevent the drift that accumulates between annual retrospectives, when the accumulated gap is too large to attribute to any single cause.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After-action_reviewverified
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