Conducting an Effective After Action Review

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Conducting an Effective After Action Review

• Objectives
• Historical Context of AARs
• Guided tour of an AAR
• Lessons Learned from Doing AARs
• Complete an AAR of this session

2
History

• Prescribed fire escapes in U.S.
• Escapes in Great Basin
• Ogden Peer Review Process
• Cascade II escape-Salt Lake

3
It was an unexpected wind event!
4
Tucson Meeting-June 2004

• Interagency Prescribed Fire Specialists
• Joined up with Wildland Fire LLC
• David Garvin-Harvard Business School
• Drafted a two-page paper

5
Organizational Learning

• AAR train the trainer workshops in SLC
• High Reliability Organizing workshops New Mexico
  and Florida

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After Action Review Process

• Four Questions
• What did we set out to do?
• What actually happened?
• Why did it happen?
• What would we do the next time?

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Hints and Advice

• Spend about 25 of time on first two questions
• The 1st question is very important
• Dont jump ahead
• No laundry lists of items
• Who can attend?
• What are you going to do with the information?
• The boss.

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Lessons Learned

• Work extremely well
• Does take some facilitation
• Who is to facilitate?
• Can be used for various jobs (monitoring)
• Concern about liability
• Philosophy of learning, wanting to be the best
• AARed to death!
• The boss is a big deal

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CAUTION

• Dont use an AAR for escape reviews

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Future

• Collecting data moving it up organizationally
• How do we know if we are learning?
• All the organization is in the room
• Improving our burn implementation?

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Safety Degrades

• Safety prescribed fire operations degrades
  it, too has a half-life. Why cant we take for
  granted whatever level of safety that has been
  attained? Because unless safety is continuously
  reaccomplished, it will decline
• Aaron Wildavsky, Searching for Safety

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It was an unexpected wind event!

• NASA the normalization of deviance
• Incubation period of disaster

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Mindfulness

• You STOP concentrating on those things that
  confirm your hunches, feel certain and that
  others agree on.
• You START concentrating on things that
  disconfirm, feel unpleasant

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Review Objectives