The Problem

You may have conducted project retrospectives at the conclusion of a project, or sprint retrospectives at the end of a multi-week development cycle. But in both cases, the feedback comes too little, too late. Team members may not share the real, underlying problems, and just nod or “rubber stamp” the meeting. Things keep going wrong, and it feels like you’re beating your head against the wall.

Instead of a late retrospective, you need a quick, efficient, blameless review as soon as something significant happens. The military uses a technique to do this called the “After Action Review” (AAR) that can be very successful.

This workshop will enable you to lead effective AARs. It shifts the focus away from following a recipe and away from assigning blame. Instead of blame, an AAR aligns everyone as a true team working toward an outcome. When every member of the team feels like they are actually part of a team and accountable to each other, everything changes. Especially AARs themselves.

What You’ll Learn

We’ll cover the basics including:

  • Format and Rules of an AAR
  • Getting Past Blame
  • Taking Effective Action
  • Using OODA Loops

And explore what you need to succeed as we cover such topics as:

  • Understand what demotivates people, and what compels people to succeed—and why that understanding is critical for an AAR
  • The necessary elements that enable teamwork and creativity
  • How to get individuals with competing goals to all focus on the same outcome
  • The things we need to be aware of that impact our perceptions
  • Things that interfere with our perceptions, and how to overcome them
  • Tools and techniques enabling effective, blame-free, outcome-oriented examination of previous events

Format

  • 6 hour remote workshop

Scheduling and Fees

For pricing and to schedule a private workshop, please email us at schedule at growsinstitute dot com with the dates you have in mind.

We have a limited number of public workshops available, follow us on twitter at @GrowsMethod, Mastodon @growsmenthod@sw-development-is.social or sign up to our mailing list for upcoming announcements.


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