CHAPTER 15
Learning in the Thick of It
by Marilyn Darling, Charles Parry, and Joseph Moore
IDEA IN BRIEF
Like many managers, you probably conduct after-action reviews (AARs) to extract lessons from key projects and apply them to others. But in most companies, AARs don’t fulfill their promise: Scrapped projects, poor investments, and failed safety measures repeat themselves, while hoped-for gains rarely materialize. One manufacturing executive, reading an AAR report for a failed project that had stumbled twice before, realized with horror that the team was “discovering” the same mistakes all over again.
How to transform your AARs from diagnoses of past failure into aids for future success? Realize that looking for lessons isn’t the same as learning ...
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