A core part of what we do as a business is to simplify tools and techniques so that people can get most of a tool’s benefit without all the usual overhead.  What we are sharing with you here is a simplified approach to the after action review.  We have also identified the few critical behaviours that you need to focus on during the review and have provided an explanation of why this approach aids learning.

The Approach
 
Tell the team that you want to set aside 5 to 10 minutes right after a meeting to hold an After Action Review.  Use the following set of questions to conduct the review;

What result did you expect?

• What went well?
• What didn’t go so well?
• What would you do differently next time?

The result question sets the context for answering the other questions.

The Leverage

As the person asking the questions you need to be sure not to over react to any of the responses you receive.   Take a minute before the review starts to think about one thing you want them to learn.  Having thought about a learning point you are ready to begin asking the questions.  Remember, once you ask a question shut up, listen and let them do the talking. 

Getting people to engage in acts of self reporting is a very powerful learning technique.  The "What didn’t go so well?" question contains the leverage.  Most of the time they will know what didn’t work and will have some idea of what they could have done differently.   Once they have found something that is worth improving you should conclude the meeting.  Don’t try to over reach by drilling into them with loads of additional questions.  By keeping the session brief and relaxed there is the potential for these reviews to become very reinforcing.

Why it creates learning

If you think about the interaction you will recognise that you didn’t have to point out what went wrong, they were able to figure it out themselves.  Research has shown that we are far more likely to do something we choose compared to something that is imposed upon us.  The things to do differently next time were chosen by them not you.

Make sure the review happens right after the event, this will capture the feedback while everyone’s memory is still fresh.  Holding the review creates the opportunity for learning but it is your behaviour of listening and not over reacting that ensures the learning occurs.

Give it a try and let us know how it went.

The plan represents the work you need to accomplish over a period of time.  A typical approach is to break the work down into a set of deliverables.^[1]  Count the number of deliverables you will have to produce by day, week or month.  Then put it on a graph and begin to track your progress.

A simple Plan vs. Actual graph is a great tool for focusing a team on what needs to get done.  It is easy to see what you intended to do and what you actually did.  Your ability to change your performance occurs at the rate of measurement;

• Monthly and you have to wait months to see the change
• Weekly and you have to wait weeks to see the change
• Daily and you will only need days to see the change

Think about it from an improvement opportunity perspective.  Monthly means you have 12 opportunities a year to make adjustments using data, weekly – 52 times a year, and daily 260 times a year.

If you are the leader then your job is to create the environment for the team to deliver the plan.  If the team isn’t delivering then they should be coming to you asking for things such as;

• More time
• More money or people
• or they can’t recover

If this isn’t happening then you haven’t created an environment where they can give you bad news.^[2]

A mentor of mine, Charlie Remsen, always said; "Begin with the end in mind."  Set out with a plan of what you need to deliver, measure your progress, adjust as necessary and chances are you deliver more that if you hadn’t tracked your progress.

Template for Plan vs. Actual Graph
 

1. ↑1 A deliverable is just like it sounds, something that you "deliver" to someone else.  These deliverables should make sense for the context of your business.   For example drawings, approvals, assessments or other such things.
2. ↑2 If you don’t take bad news well then you won’t get any.

Second rule of hole management, determine the depth.

Third rule of hole management, start filling in the hole.

These rules may seem rather obvious but have a look around…

     – How many people do you see practicing these rules?
     – How do you start practicing these rules?

Teams often get lost and forget that in addition to doing their work they need to practice some simple project management.  But once they have strayed away from the original plan they begin to improvise and create all kinds of work arounds.  Improvisation is so much more fun than structured work.  When improvising you get to be a hero, you get to rescue the project, bring it back from the brink and the people around you reinforce you for your great achievement.  This is hole digging behaviour.

If you don’t  agree with try the following; go find the original plan.  Often you will find that the plan is stale and out of date, the plan was never really a plan, or the plan never existed.  So if the plan really isn’t in good shape then get the team to stop what they are doing and assess the situation.  I often hear people saying, we can’t stop it would cost us too much time.  Hold on, I thought we just realised we were in a hole and needed to find a way out?

To assess the situation we must figure out what we are expected to deliver, then how much of it has been done & which bits are usable.  Now we can figure out how much remains to be done.  The other good bit about this type of exercise is we can determine how much longer we need in order to complete the remaining work.  If you think about it you know how much has been done, how long it took and how many people were involved.  This will give you a pretty good read on productivity.  Use that bit of data to re-baseline the programme.

West Wing – Season 2 Episode 10

This guy’s walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. 

A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, ‘Hey you. Can you help me out?’  The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on. 

Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, ‘Father, I’m down in this hole can you help me out?’  The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. 

Then a friend walks by, ‘Hey, Joe, it’s me can you help me out?’   And the friend jumps in the hole.  Our guy says, ‘Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.’ 

The friend says, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.’

We have seen this approach work time and time again and we have helped teams stop what they are doing, figure out where they are, how to recover and actually recover.  This has been done on projects that cost several hundred thousand of pounds and we have seen it done on multiple billion pound projects.

Slow down before you try to speed up.  If you stop and make the assessment you can find your way out of these holes.  Stopping to make the assessment also lets the team know that something different is possible.

PS.  If you keep digging at some point the hole gets so deep that the walls cave in on top of you.

One of my co-workers just swung by my desk the other day.  He was always on the heavy side and has obviously lost a whole lot of weight.  I said to him, "You’ve caught my disease."  To which he laughed and said, "Actually I’ve been meaning to tell you that you were my inspiration to make a change in my life and get things back in order."  You can’t imagine how it feels to be an inspiration to someone.  It’s really amazing.  It was one thing to have succeeded in my weight loss goal but a whole other thing to be pulling others along with me!  Anyway….it just felt so good I wanted to share!  I’m sure we have all inspired people in our life times.  I hope whoever you have inspired has shared it with you too!

There are two important message in this story;

    – Those watching may be pulled along

    – If watching offer encouragement

Change is often difficult to detect if we don’t know how to look for the early shaping steps that would indicate things are being done differently.  Our impatience causes us to give up too early.  It also causes us to miss the other things that are going on around us.  Things like other people watching us to see what we are going to do and how we are reacting to others.  They may even be helping us out or modeling our behaviours in other areas.

You never know who may be watching you and deciding to make a change based on what they see you doing.  So don’t give up.

If you are watching don’t forget to offer up a word of encouragement.

Gandhi said "You should be the change that you want to see in the world."

Ok the background on the episode;

Gordon is going to help Nick who runs Nick’s Bistro @ Rococo Restaurant in King’s Lynn.  Nick is a former Michelin Star Chef with £100k of debt.  Things aren’t looking good.

Gordon’s goal is to help Nick turn the place around.  He shows up and makes an assessment of the current environment.  He finds the following;

• Prices are high for what the local area will support (sales)
• Supplies are expensive and doesn’t take advantage of the local produce (expenses)
• Restaurant isn’t attracting customers (revenue)
• The food is pretentious and fussy (product)
• Nick doesn’t have a plan to change (leadership)

Gordon asks Nick about using local produce.  Nick says "blah blah blah" and rationalises away his actions.  Gordon goes out and does his own reconnaissance and finds out that Nick’s perception just isn’t reality.  He then takes Nick out to show him the reality of the local suppliers. (management information)

Next he gives the team a little test so he can see check their thinking and skill level. (performance data)  He does a ‘Ready, Steady, Cook’ and gives them 20 minutes to prepare a dish.  They make one dish.  Gordon says "look you could have made a starter and a main with the same ingredients and made a good profit."  He now has a read on how in tune they are with making money.

Gordon has used all this to create what John Kotter calls a sense of urgency.  The stage is now set for a change to occur.  Start the transformation.  Gordon helps the team create a new environment.  He does this by;

• Changing the menu
• Renaming the restaurant to Maggie’s
• Redecorating
• Gets Nick to throw away the ego items (ie guide books that say how great Nick’s old restaurant was in years gone by).^[2]
• Goes out into the town to announce the new restaurant. (marketing on a shoe string)

To try and ensure that the changes stick, Gordon seeks out the allies around Nick who will provide reinforcement to help him keep these new behaviours and changes on track.

The process Gordon has taken Nick through is modelled after the Kübler-Ross curve.^[3]  First Nick denies there is a problem.  Then he increases the resistance as demonstrated by him locking Gordon out of the restaurant.  He then lets Gordon back in and says, ‘last night I had a good cry…I have hit the bottom and the penny has finally dropped.’

Gordon says good, now lets move forward.  Fair play to Nick, he does move forward and two months later, on a return visit, Gordon finds things turned around.  Nick says all the suppliers are paid up to date and things are in order.  The restaurant is again profitable.

I was struck by this show because Gordon demonstrates so many of the elements that we are trying to get across to people in business;

• Pinpoint the result you want to achieve
• Analyse the current situation
• Change the environment
• Evaluate the change
• Sustain the change

All of this activity is underpinned by data.

The bit I find interesting is that Gordon uses Negative Reinforcement to create the sense of urgency and change.  (I think this is absolutely the right approach.)  He then attempts to provide a little bit of Positive Reinforcement to sustain the change.

The set of behaviours he uses to create results are tipped more toward the negative.  The language laced with ‘F’ this and that is insulting.  His dose of punishment often leads to the other party shutting down in his presence or a delayed outburst once the bully has left.   (The scrappier ones come back swinging.) 

To have a sustainable model, the use of negative reinforcement to create a sense of urgency must be done inside the context of a positive environment.  The leader has to have spent time building trust with the performers before they have the credibility to deliver the negative reinforcement.  If this process is rushed the performers often feel like they are just being punished and will seek revenge on the organisation.

Most leaders I know don’t even do a good line in creating a negative environment like Gordon.  They simply issue empty threats to their staff and then spend time alone or with their mates.  They create a work environment of extinction. 

When we start to talk to these leaders about performance they take the same stance that Nick took; look I am a professional, I know what I am doing, there isn’t anything wrong here, anyway what do you know.  What they need is a sense of urgency, they need some data, they need a good dose of negative reinforcement to get them to wake up and smell the coffee.

Now to find a leader inside the organisation who is interested in performance.  Once you find that creating a sense of urgency becomes a whole lot easier.

Besides talent, one thing Gordon has over most leaders is a focus on performance.  He knows his target and stays over it the whole time.  He has some amazing instincts,^[4] that serve him well.  There is no doubt that he is very successful. 

Do I want him to change? No. 

Why?  It just wouldn’t be good television if he did.

1. ↑1 Although I am not sure my wife enjoyed the running commentary.  Since we have Sky+ she could always rewind to catch what she missed during my excited outbursts
2. ↑2 This is an interesting point.  Daniel Goldman of Emotional Intelligence fame suggests that IQ + EQ > EGO if you are going to be successful.  Nick has got this equation out of balance and it has prevented him from seeing reality.  He is cooking for his EGO not for his customers.
3. ↑3 See my earlier post about A Serious Dose of Negative Reinforcement.
4. ↑4 In another episode Gordon got a pub turned around by creating the campaign for real gravy.  Simple, elegant and easy for all the pub’s staff to understand and execute.

I pushed them very hard using a technique called Socratic questioning.  I thought they might just tune me out at one point but they hung in there.  Looking back they said it helped them expand and strengthen their thinking.  They felt like they had advanced their idea.

I have seen many good ideas or plans that have not been passed through a lens of critical thinking.  In the process of getting the original idea down on paper and making a set of slides people fall in love with their work and feel like the job is done.  If you ask them critical questions they become defensive and this serves to protect the first pass of the idea.  They miss the opportunity to strengthen their thinking by engaging in some rigorous debate.

This is a sculpture by Rachel Whiteread that depicts the space the object does not inhabit, sometimes called the negative space.  What I was trying to help these entrepreneurs discover was their space beneath the stairs.   I believe they have a very interesting idea but the real discovery is still hidden.  They haven’t completed the critical thinking that will help them build something truly unique.

I first heard of the idea of the space beneath the stairs while listening to a recording of Charles Handy’s speech from it@cork.  In this talk Charles describes how entrepreneurs see the space beneath the stairs and that is what makes their ideas truly different.

I am a firm believer that without rigorous debate you won’t be able to create an environment that will support high performance.   The person doing the Socratic questioning can often be seen to be very threatening, aggressive or just plain negative.  To be able to engage in rigorous debate you have to have a trusting relationship with the other parties. 

My friend Howard and I often engage in these discussions.   During our most creative moments we use this technique to explore all kinds of ideas and improve the quality of our thinking.  Most of these discussions are held in the privacy of our offices.  On occasion we have invited other people to join in on one of these sessions.  As the questioning unfolds you can see a look of concern on their faces.  They are very worried that there is something wrong between Howard and I.  We have to explain to them that everything is ok.  Often we point to the finished product and say look, these are two fantastic ideas that we got out of the session.

I want to be clear that we aren’t yelling at each other.  The approach is more sophisticated than that; what we are doing is asking very intense, focused questions that are designed to probe and uncover our underlying assumptions and mental models.  We feel that to be at our best for our clients our practice sessions must be rigorous. 

The value we bring is helping others to see the space beneath the stairs.  They don’t see these spaces because they are too busy running up and down the stairs.

Why do I share this story? Well I figure my version of the future is going to come to pass. You see I believe that I can read the tea leaves.

How have I come to have this wonderful ability?  Well I have spent the last 7 years studying human behaviour. Am I an expert? No, just a hack.

I have read many research articles, journals and books. I have spent countless hours engaged in discussions about my findings with the practitioners, gurus, professors and sceptics. My studies of human behaviour tells me that you can objectively observe what is happening today and then use that data to predict, with a high degree of certainty, what will occur in the future.

The research shows that our behaviour is conditioned by our learning history, or the consequences to which we have been repeatedly exposed and the environment. Put another way, past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour.

His argument was that the management team is doing something different and thereby changing the environment. My observation, they are messing around in the green zone, haven’t got any where near The Action and are more interested in their political masters than the performance occurring down in The Action. The term for this type of person I believe is a bureaucrat.

These bureaucrats busy themselves with operational detail and therefore can’t possibility be acting in a strategic manner.  To be strategic you need to create some relaxed room in your head for critical thinking and application of Socratic questioning  to verify that you have a robust strategy.

Over dinner I made an observation that people in The Action believe this or that. He says nothing could be further from the truth. My question back to him is, “Who are your eyes and ears inside The Action? How do you get a true read on what they are thinking? Or what they perceive as reality?” He says this doesn’t matter.

I disagree; folks in The Action are great observers of these green zone bureaucrats. They listen to what the bureaucrats say and the watch what they do. The practitioners take this evidence, compare it to their history with these bureaucrats and draw conclusions about what the future will hold.

The green zone has taken it’s eye off the goal of creating an environment that will encourage high performance. The life in this lush green zone involves sun flowering to the political masters.

The practitioners find themselves enveloped in fog and sensing an impending storm they batten down the hatches. The bureaucrats look down upon this group and see non performance. They pass judgement, offer up a new prescription to cure the ills and everyone finds themselves in a self fulfilling prophecy of inevitable reorganisation.

So back to my original point…I can predict the future and the future is rosy right up until the point at which the truth can no longer be casually brushed aside with a dismissive scoff of “you don’t understand”.

Can the future be changed? Yes.

Is it going to be easy? No.

You can’t just take a pill, you have to eat less and exercise more if this is going to work.

After trying Gyroq for a few days I decided it was a piece of software that was worth buying.  GyroQ is an elegant piece of software that does one thing well.  That one thing is capture actions without breaking the flow of your work.  When you want to process all those thoughts just load up gyroq and it will dump it all into a mindmap.  (Yes it is integrated with Mindmanager from Mindjet).

Marc Orchant writes about it here.

I have 10 invites to try/buy the software.  Drop me a line if you want one.

Since we were with a group of rabid (sorry) avid photographers we then spent the day driving around looking for all kinds of stuff. 
Back home for 7pm, bucket shower (3 minutes of water between two people), dinner at 8pm and bed at 10:30pm. 

I was awake almost every morning at 3am since either a buffalo, elephant or zebra was right outside the tent eating.

It was scenes like this, that happened several times a day, that made for a fabulous trip.