Coaching practices for After Action Review Decision Making

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For After Action Review Decision Making, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• That big thing just wrapped up and didn’t land how I wanted, and I can already feel myself rushing on to the next thing
• When something goes badly I’ll pick it apart for hours, but when something actually goes great I just enjoy it and move on without a second thought
• Every time I try to look back at what went wrong it just turns into me beating myself up
• I have the same realization after every messy episode
• When I replay this in my own head I always land on the same tidy story, and some part of me suspects I’m protecting myself

Practices that may help

1. After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
   An after-action review (AAR) is a structured debriefing developed by the US Army that asks four questions after any event: What was supposed to happen? What actually happened? What caused the difference? What do we do differently next time? Applied consistently, AARs build a culture of learning from experience rather than simply moving on. The evidence base is primarily observational and practice-based; experimental studies are limited but supportive.
2. Run the four-question AAR within 24 hours of any significant event
   What was planned? What happened? Why the gap? What next? — answered while memory is fresh.
   After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
3. Apply the AAR to successes, not only setbacks
   Reviewing what actually caused a win produces replicable insight; reviewing only failures produces only loss-avoidance.
   After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
4. Separate judgment from analysis in the debrief
   The AAR only produces learning when the analysis phase is free of performance judgments.
   After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
5. End every AAR with one specific, time-bound next action
   An AAR without a concrete next action produces insight without change.
   After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
6. Include a trusted other in high-stakes AARs
   Self-conducted AARs have blind spots; a peer or coach who was not inside the event sees the causal story differently.
   After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
7. Run a weekly decision review session
   Set aside 20 minutes each week to score past decisions and extract one lesson.
   Decision Journaling: Learning to Decide Better Over Time
8. Pair the RACI with a decision log
   Knowing who decides is only half the system — recording what was decided closes the accountability loop.
   The RACI Matrix, Made Practical
9. Score decision quality separately from outcome quality
   Judge the process you used — not whether it worked — when you review a past decision.
   Decision Journaling: Learning to Decide Better Over Time
10. Build a regular AAR cadence, not just crisis-triggered reviews
    Reviews triggered only by problems create a negative-events database; a regular cadence captures ordinary learning that compounds.
    After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning

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