Just a Crew Thing? I Think Not
Damn, it happened again! I was stunned recently when an influential member of the wildland-fire community stood before an assembled group of his peers and declared, as if it were a matter of fact, that an after-action review was “a crew thing.” The speaker went on to suggest, like an ad for Las Vegas, that what happens in an AAR stays in the AAR. On one hand, this experience shows how successful the leadership movement has been. A speaker at a national conference could safely assume that most people in the audience knew what an AAR was. These days, we can also be pretty sure that a big part of the wildland fire work force conducts some type of AAR — at least sometimes.
But where did we get the idea that an AAR is only a crew thing? And why would we want crews to conduct AARs but isolate anyone else from the learning that comes from them? People have repeated the idea that an AAR is a crew affair and what happens in the AAR stays in the AAR like a mantra, almost since wildland firefighters started doing AARs.
Please don't get me wrong. I do know and understand the punitive environment that firefighters face and have come to fear. I also appreciate that AAR proponents suspect that agency managers may screw up the AAR tool. Finally, some of the people who maintain that we must restrict the AAR technique are people I hold in high esteem. I just respectfully disagree with them and believe that an AAR represents a powerful organizational learning tool, the potential of which we will we will fail to realize if we persist with this line of thinking.
I don't quarrel with the idea that an AAR provides a simple, powerful tool that enables crews to learn from their daily experiences. I just argue that the AAR tool can be — and should be — so much more, a mission-critical vector for organizational learning. However, to get full value requires two things. First, we must accept that using the AAR tool makes sense at all levels of the organization. Second, we must understand that organizations succeed when people share information and learn from experience across organizational levels.
Let's consider the U.S. Army, which created the AAR method. Do you believe for one instant that an Army platoon would not share information from an after-action review if they believed that their experience would benefit another platoon, their company or the broader organization? Sure, I can accept that no one outside the platoon needs to know that Private Smith fell asleep on duty. But I'd bet that the Army shares information widely when the enemy breaches a checkpoint by employing a previously unknown tactic.
Similarly, we're not going to tell everyone if Firefighter Jones shows up late, forgets her hardhat, and lights her boot on fire with a drip torch. However, if Jones' crew discovers that the new drip torches malfunction, wouldn't we want everyone to know?
I recently heard two real-life stories that illustrate my point. In one case, a prescribed-burning team recognized a serious safety concern. They had been burning around park boardwalks constructed of recycled-plastic materials and found that if allowed to ignite from smoldering fuels, those boardwalk materials emitted toxic smoke. Why on Earth would we wish to confine learning from that experience to this one crew, when these materials have become common in parks across the country? In another case, a crew's engine burned in the parking lot of their hotel. As it turned-out, a small, easily corrected design flaw caused the fire — a flaw common to other engines in the agency's fleet. Had they not shared information from this experience, the problem could have occurred again and again, even inside the agency's stations.
In Be, Know, Do, their most excellent adaptation of the Army leadership manual, authors Gen. Eric Shinseki and Frances Hesselbein say, “Army leaders at all levels from squads and platoons to the highest strategic level use AARs to promote learning that improves performance.” Obviously, the Army never intended the AAR, its brainchild, to be a tool used only at the squad or platoon level. Neither should fire agencies perpetuate the idea that an AAR is a “crew thing.” The Army believes that its leaders must be able to lead an AAR, and I believe the same to be true for fire service leaders.
Shinseki and Hesselbein also described the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff delivering the findings of the Kosovo AAR to the Senate. This story is just one example of many that the Army clearly uses the AAR technique to move information around, not to isolate learning to the people participating in the AAR. Whether information from an AAR should be shared is not a yes-or-no, either-or proposition. Much of what gets discussed in an informal AAR constitutes little more than on-the-spot coaching to improve unit performance, and need not leave the unit. However, as professionals, firefighters maintain a responsibility, an ethic, and a duty to share information uncovered in an AAR, when that information has implications for the broader work force.
AAR practice entered the wildland fire agencies through the leadership training, when the leadership training was just a grassroots effort. At the origin of the leadership movement, the people responsible for leadership training directed much of their effort at borrowing effective techniques from other industries and disciplines, placing emphasis on rapid adoption rather than optimization. I can't argue with the strategy, after all, it worked. I just suggest that, when it comes to the AAR, fire agencies have reached a jumping-off point, and the time to move ahead with this excellent learning and performance improvement tool.
Mike DeGrosky is chief executive officer of the Guidance Group, a consulting organization specializing in the human and organizational aspects of the fire service. He also serves as an adjunct instructor in leadership studies at Fort Hays State University. His interests include leadership, strategy, and bringing the concepts of learning organizations and high-reliability organizing alive in fire organizations. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. focused on organizational leadership. He can be reached at info@guidancegroup.org.
