RAAR! Rapid After-Action Review

Rapid After-Action Review (RAAR) is a quick and easy exercise in collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA) that teams can build into everyday work processes.  A RAAR is a 1-hour facilitated discussion with a simple, structured note-taking template designed to help a team not only pause and reflect, but also prioritize specific management actions and timeframes to make change.  

Background: Working closely with USAID colleagues to build a culture of data-driven decisionmaking, I’ve often heard that it’s hard to find time to pause, reflect, and adapt.  USAID’s operational policy encourages CLA at all levels, but staff are likely to be most familiar with mission-wide, time-intensive exercises like Portfolio Review and strategic stocktaking.  Team-level CLA often occurs informally as part of routine meetings and management: without explicit planning or documentation, it can be difficult to keep track of, act on, and share the benefits of creative critical thinking.  To help colleagues reap the benefits of CLA without a major time commitment, Rapid After Action Review addresses the question, “What could be done in an hour?”    

Why Rapid After Action Review (RAAR)?  USAID’s official guidance for After Action Review can seem daunting at first glance: "An assessment conducted after a project or major activity that allows team members and leaders to discover (learn) what happened and why, reassess direction, and review both successes and challenges.”  Assessment?  Major activity? Yikes! This sounds like it’s going to take a while.  But with a deep breath and a second look, the underlying structure of an AAR is actually quite simple and straightforward:  

• 1) What went well?  

• 2) What didn’t?  

• 3) What could we do differently? 

What makes RAAR different from normal After Action Review (AAR)?  With busy colleagues in mind, I designed a template for Rapid After-Action Review that condenses these 3 fundamental questions into a 1-hour facilitated discussion, the same length as a standard team meeting.  

Each question is discussed for fifteen minutes.  Participants are asked to think through not only what went well or didn’t, but why.  This small mental shift helps the group focus their feedback on what could be done differently within the team’s manageable interest.

The RAAR template also adds a crucial 4th step in the last fifteen minutes of the meeting: creating a low-stakes but concrete action plan, targeted by participants to the date of their next major decision point.  In this way, feedback on what could be done differently is immediately prioritized and operationalized.

Who can use Rapid AAR?  As a simple but standardized practice, RAAR can be used by decision-makers at any level to build a culture of intentional, collaborative learning for adaptive management. Strengthening CLA in USAID is often about making informal good practices intentional, systematic, and resourced. Running a RAAR can help ensure that a variety of team members' voices are heard in the decision-making process, as well as reinforce skills in group prioritization and action planning.   

When is RAAR most helpful?  A helpful point of entry for CLA using RAAR is the desire to improve repeating events or processes, such as trainings, site visits, or PPR: this means the team can focus action planning on improving the next training, site visit, or PPR.  Many offices already collect formal or informal feedback from colleagues on such processes, but may not consolidate feedback in one place or link it explicitly with decision-making.   While you can run a RAAR anytime, try for a slot within a week or two of implementation, when the team’s memories will be sharp and important decisions need to be made.  If time is limited, consider asking for the hour of an existing team meeting. 

How do you do it?  Call a 1-hour meeting with your team.  Let participants know the structure of the meeting, including and whether they'll be asked to provide feedback in advance.

Create a copy of the attached Google Drive template for your RAAR and fill in your specific information.  Read through the instructions (provided in the template) and think about how best to facilitate your group.  If you use Google or another online collaborative platform, you may want to share the document in advance, to help get people’s feedback flowing.  

In the meeting, facilitate 15 minutes of discussion for each of the 3 questions and the action plan. Take clear, concise notes, and facilitate to include the voices of everyone at the table. Keep the conversation focused on what successes or challenges are within the team's manageable interest to change. For Action Planning, review your actual notes with the team to identify priority action points, as well as who is responsible to carry them out and by what date.  

As the teams I work with used the RAAR process over time, they identified two extra categories for action planning that may be useful for your team: things not to do next time, and things to plan for in the longer term.  Use them if they are useful to your team, and feel free to skip them if they are not!

Successes: USAID teams that have conducted Rapid After-Action Review include the following:  

• Tanzania Program Office, to strengthen PPR processes, both internally and with Mission technical teams 

• Tanzania CDCS Consultative Group, to pause and reflect on a high-level field visit and document actionable stakeholder contribution to the mission’s country-level strategic stocktaking exercise

• Global Development Lab/Center for Digital Development, to iteratively adapt the Digital Development training delivered to Missions, improve monitoring and evaluation tools and processes, and adaptively manage an DC-based FSN fellowship program with feedback directly from FSN fellows, among other uses.

Initially, all teams were cautious about the value of RAAR - however, after trying the approach, both OUs went on to request or initiate similar AARs themselves.  

The Knowledge and Insights team in the Center for Digital Development at the Global Development Lab began conducting RAARs of their signature, week-long training in March of 2018.  As team members became more familiar with the format, they began to apply it to other workstreams as well.  As of June 2020, the team has run RAARs more than 8 times, and incorporates RAAR findings into the adaptive management of trainings and fellowships.  John O’Bryan, team lead, says: 

 “The beauty of the RAAR is that it’s not rocket science. It is a simple structured tool that walks you through ‘what went well, what didn’t, what can we change now, and what can we change further down the road.’ And once you get in a rhythm of conducting RAARs it becomes much easier to take those lessons and incorporate them into future activities.”  

Challenges: The limited timeframe of a RAAR forces participants to focus on a subset of their feedback, and may exclude comments that could be important for learning. Even with deft facilitation, enthusiastic or powerful stakeholders may dominate the conversation. Any action plan will only be useful if it is used. Ways to mitigate these limitations:

• Demonstrate value:  If the facilitator can help the team to make concrete, actionable decisions in the space of an hour, participants may be willing to meet again to follow up on this plan.  

• Make space for many voices:  Hold multiple RAARs with different stakeholder groups - e.g., trainers as well as trainees; or technical office staff, M&E staff, and Program Office staff for a major mission process like PPR.  Offer the opportunity for participants to write comments anonymously on sticky notes if they feel less comfortable sharing out loud.

• Use collaborative channels for feedback:  Without making it a requirement, share a Google Doc before/after the meeting to collect feedback, or invite participants to email their comments.  If any feedback is received, make sure it is acknowledged in discussion during the in-person meeting.  

  • Google’s edit history does not anonymize comments: several participants have noted that they prefer to have their notes received as general comments by the facilitator for this reason.

• Ensuring action: Choose a single date for priority action points: a follow-up meeting can then be scheduled by that date to check in on what’s been completed and plan the next round of priorities.  

Links to existing AAR Resources:  USAID's Learning Lab includes USAID After-Action Review Guidance (2012), as well as a CLA Toolkit resource on Facilitating Pause & Reflect (2018) that includes AAR in a list of many types of adaptive management exercises.  For full Program-Cycle guidance on the importance of adapting, see PPL's Discussion Note on Adaptive Management.