Knowledge Management - Learning After
Any actions you take within your work will generate information. The day to day activities within all of our jobs contain countless opportunities for learning, more than we are in a position to use. Knowledge management provides a number of tools for learning after the event in order to improve later practice.
This doesn't just mean learning from negative experiences. Knowledge management tools are useful for finding out what went wrong, but they are also useful for identifying good results and examining the practice that led to them.
After Action review
An After Action Review (AAR) is a technique for immediate analysis and learning from an incident or action, designed to be conducted immediately or shortly following the conclusion of the action. In the context of a quality improvement project it would be used immediately after the conclusion of the "do" phase in order to examine the following questions:
- What was supposed to happen?
- What actually happened?
- Why was there a difference?
- What can we learn from this?
In an after action review, a facilitator brings the participants in the action together as soon as possible after the conclusion of the action, and runs through these questions. At each stage making sure that every participant's viewpoint has been considered and everyone is on the same page about what has been discussed before moving on. This is a systematic approach that can identify:
- Discrepancies in knowledge about the originally intended course of action
- Miscommunication about what was done and why
- Reasons for things not going as planned that don't centre on blame
- Lessons to be learned and next steps to do things better next time.
The structured conversation approach of the after action review, combined with impartial facilitator, means that voices that might get drowned out in other review processes are able to give their side of things. The lack of blame within the model means that the group can move past discussions of who was at fault for something not going as planned and instead look at how to make sure that the team as a whole can improve how they work in future.
At the conclusion of the AAR, the facilitator will produce a report detailing the conversation that took place in the review, with any actions or next steps spelled out as detailed objectives assigned to a particular person. These can be incorporated into any further plans for service development.
Retrospect
Whereas an after action review captures learning in the moment by recording the immediate aftermath of an action, incident, or piece of work, a retrospective meeting is about capturing the learning from a project as a whole. It usually takes place at the end of a major project stage not to review individual actions but to review the project as a whole. Often this is done ad one of the final actions that a particular iteration of a project group take together, as the last opportunity to capture the learning of the group as a whole where every participant point of view is recorded.
A retrospective meeting happens soon after the close of the project or project stage. The group appoint a facilitator who will invite the people involved in the project but also any key stakeholders who might have a valuable perspective. The facilitator will then run them through a number of questions to make sure that anything the group can be learned from the project is learned. The questions are as follows:
- What was the objective of the project? What did or didn't we achieve? Why?
- What were the successes of the project and what were their reasons? How can we or others repeat these successes in future
- What were the disappointments of the project and why did they happen? How can we or others avoid these disappointments in future?
- How would you score this project out of 10? What would have needed to happen to make it a 10?
This last stage is more optional than the first three, and can be replaced by:
What would an ideal version of this project look like? How can future projects of this type be closer to this ideal?
As with the After Action Review, this is interested in learning rather than blame. The purpose is to identify what can be learned and what can be done differently next time.
A report from this retrospective meeting should be prepared by the facilitator, circulated to the team, and can be turned into a knowledge asset for other people doing work in this area, for storage in a local or organisational repository.
For more information about these techniques, to access toolkits relating to different knowledge management techniques, or to look into having the library facilitate a knowledge management session with your team, get in contact with the library.