After-action reviews: The good behavior, the bad behavior, and why we should care

After action reviews have been a common learning and reliability intervention in organizations for decades, and though they have attracted the interest of scholars in recent years, researchers have yet to consider practitioner views of what makes these meetings more or less effective and to check their association with desired outcomes. The current multi-study begins by investigating what makes for good and bad after-action reviews (AARs) using an inductive approach and analyzing responses to open-ended questions about AAR attendee behaviors perceived as more or less effective by participants. Building upon Study 1, Study 2 focuses on the effects of good attendee behavior on desirable outcomes for AARs in high-reliability organizations (HROs). Self-reported data were obtained through online surveys (N = 311). As hypothesized, the first study found that when open-ended questions were posed to firefighters there was strong agreement on what is required to facilitate a good AAR and prevent a bad one. The second study found that conducting AARs provides a venue for team building and potentially enhancing the safety climate on crews.