After Action Review

Most retrospectives are an unstructured "how did it go?" that produces venting and vague lessons. The After Action Review imposes the structure that actually carries the benefit: compare what was expected to what actually happened, diagnose why the gaps occurred (in both directions), and convert that into what to sustain and what to change, specifically and with owners. The expected-vs-actual comparison is load-bearing; without a recorded expectation there is nothing to learn against, only hindsight narrative. The output is an after-action review, and it must be blameless to work.

When to Use

• A project, launch, sprint, experiment, or incident has finished.
• There was a real expectation to compare the outcome against (or you can reconstruct it honestly).
• The team wants to learn, not assign fault.

When NOT to Use

• Before the event (that is a premortem).
• As a status update or a summary of what shipped.
• When it will become blame (it stops working the moment people fear fault).
• When there is genuinely no expectation and none can be honestly reconstructed.

Instructions