Helpful article on decision making within organizations

Thanks Sheila. This article discounted After Action Review saying it was too difficult to do them well. Hm, I use them every chance I get, steal, or am allowed. They're easy.

Here's how I tweak it:

1. Recognize the chief value is regular times close to the event for each member to reflect on their contribution to the team's results. We do them right at the end of the meeting.

2. Begin with first attention to self. I start off with "one thing I did well that helped this meeting ... and "One thing I could do better for next time." And we go around to everyone. Not everyone "gets it" and might check out with "this was productive." Not an issue. The value is they offer their voice.

3. Deal with interactional points immediately. Around 2005 I must have first learned about what I relabeled After Meeting Review from reading the Army's Field Operations guide. Ready to try it out, I volunteered to facilitate the first meeting of a project team and included AMR. We stayed with the practice. Not much came up of note. Except twice.

Once we had not seen one another for a long time and spent about a 25% of our limited time (by mutual agreement) checking in. During AMR, T. said "we have just 90 minutes, and we spent 20 of those checking in." That's all, after that we checked in with a word or two. From 20 down to less than a minute.

The second time was much more serious. We were co-editing a document, and someone who had volunteered to take up a chunk of the drafting was having trouble finding the m-dash (—) keystroke combination on her Windows machine. It's a breeze on a Mac. During the meeting, we kidded around about it and carried on with the work. When her turn came to speak at the AMR, she said the kidding hurt her. She felt insecure about her writing and took the work as chance to grow, but the kidding left her doubting herself more. We all apologized and she accepted that. We cheered her work, how it helped, how good it was, etc. That was that, but without AMR we might never have known and she would have privately withdrawn into herself mumbling about her insensitive colleagues. That would have hurt the team because we had more challenges to address and needed everyone engaged.