Adaptive Action questions are:
1. WHAT did you observe?
2. SO WHAT did you learn?
3. NOW WHAT will you do in future?
To work in complex environments, you and your team must learn continually. It is not enough for individuals to learn for themselves, the team also needs a discipline for learning together.
Encourage your team to talk about what worked and also surface their failures and concerns after every significant event. By acknowledging and talking about their experiences, the team can see, understand, and influence patterns of activity to improve performance in their next similar events.
What?
Action in complex situations requires innovation, and innovation requires occasional failures. Some people even think that, “If you haven’t failed, you will never succeed because you aren’t taking enough risks.” The After Action Adaptive Action Review is a simple process that you and your team can use to pause, reflect, and capture what you have learned after the event has been experienced and discussed.
So What?
After a project or initiative, bring all the team or stakeholders together to share an inquiry into what worked and what didn’t.
Begin by describing the goal or purpose of the activity you just completed, then ask each person, in turn, to answer a series of questions. Each person offers their feedback in turn to reflect on their experiences, to share their learning, and commit to a change in their future actions.
To be effective, the participants should follow some rules to create an agreed format to create a context for learning and action:
Give feedback ONLY to participants. This ensures that there is no blaming or shaming for people who have no power to respond or to make a change. The team or project leader holds the responsibility to set conditions for others to be successful, and they are ultimately accountable for the performance of all. Sometimes corrective performance feedback is required, and this should happen in one-on-one, private sessions between the leader and the staff member.
Stay in inquiry. It is easy to fall into explanations of how something was done or defend the way it was done. The more fruitful exploration the inquiry about what actually happened and how it might have been different. It can be helpful to follow the Rules for Inquiry:
Turn judgement into curiosity
Turn conflict into shared exploration
Turn defensiveness into self-reflection
Turn assumptions into questions
Focus forward. Nothing you say will change the past, so it is much more productive to focus on what will happen in the future. Sometimes called “feed forward.” Acknowledge what happened (as you see it,) but move quickly into learnings and opportunities for working differently in future.
After everyone has spoken, the leaders should summarise, and the group should record their individual and collective commitments.
Now What?
The best, and often only, way to learn and embed a new practices, is to practice it.
Begin today. Consider some activity, project, event, or initiative that you or your team is engaging in right now.
Use part of your next meeting to practice an After-Action Adaptive Action. When it is completed, reflect together on what worked and what might have worked better. Then, make it a habit for collaborative learning and performance improvement in the future.
