Use Start-Stop-Keep reviews to drive continuous improvement

Regularly ask what the team should start, stop, and keep doing — and act on the answers.

Why it works

Performance improvement requires more than adding new practices; it also requires removing practices that have outlived their usefulness. Start-Stop-Keep reviews make both the addition and subtraction explicit and team-sourced, surfacing operational improvements the leader may not see from above. The discipline of actually stopping things is what creates capacity to start new ones.

How to do it

1. Conduct Start-Stop-Keep reviews at team level quarterly and at leadership team level annually.
2. Make the "Stop" list as important as the "Start" list — commit to removing at least one practice before adding one.
3. Act on the output publicly so the team sees that feedback leads to change.
4. Distinguish "stop because it’s not working" from "stop because we’ve grown past it" — different conversations.

Evidence

After-action review research in military and organizational settings consistently finds that structured reflection on what worked and what didn’t accelerates learning and performance improvement compared to unstructured review. (observational)

Start-Stop-Keep is a specific practitioner format; the broader AAR and debriefing research is the empirical anchor. Effectiveness depends heavily on psychological safety within the team.

Sources

• Tannenbaum & Cerasoli (2013), do team and individual debriefs enhance performance? Human Factors

Common mistake

Generating start and stop lists without actually implementing them — the review becomes a ritual of generating ideas rather than a mechanism for organizational learning.