The US military has devised two systems to help it learn from experience and avoid reinventing the wheel. One is called the AAR (After Action Review). Before returning to barracks, commanders gather troops in small groups and present them with six questions:
- What did we set out to do?
- What actually happened?
- What went well?
- What went badly?
- What have we learnt?
- What will we do differently the next time?
The first four questions focus on the purpose of the exercise, observing without evaluating and then evaluating what took place. The final two questions are about the present and future: can we articulate what we have learnt, and how can we ensure we will not make the same mistakes again or make sure we will be more effective when we do this exercise again?
Answers to the final two questions are noted by the commanders, who send them to CALL (Centre for Army Lessons Learnt). These “lessons learnt” are collated by CALL and disseminated back into the field so that everyone learns from everyone else’s experiences. The US military hopes to be a learning organisation that does not repeat the same mistakes, but instead sets up a structure for continually learning from what actually happens. Army effectiveness notwithstanding, the idea behind the AAR seems an excellent one. I use it a lot in supervision training as it tackles several areas:
- Can we learn from experience and ensure we do not repeat the mistakes of the past?
- Can we learn from others’ experience (what Leonardo da Vinci called “learning by proxy”)?
- Can we learn together?
- Can our collective experience help us to learn from the past and prepare for our future?
Coaching, as one of the newest professions, is in pole position to make best use of the AAR. Coaches come from diverse professional backgrounds, bringing a wealth of experience, knowledge and skills. I was around in the late 1970s and the 1980s, when counselling and counselling psychology was going through its adolescence. Looking back, there was a number of lessons learnt that could be of great assistance to our fledgling profession. We learnt a lot about tribalism, integration, competencies, the stages of professional development, supervision and its usefulness. We have a wealth of research on the curative factors in counselling provision and what makes the difference to an effective outcome. I am thinking also of coaching colleagues who come from other backgrounds business, marketing, HR, education, psychology – each of them bringing deep learning to the profession.
What a waste if we continue to invent wheels when there are already wheels to guide us in devising the best one. What might it look like if we set up the CCLL centre: the Centre for Coaching Lessons Learnt? A multiprofessional group could be a think-tank to gather lessons learnt from other professions and assess them for their effectiveness in coaching.
The centre could also collect the best practice of life coaches and executive coaches. It would then share these lessons with us. Wouldn’t we benefit both as coaches and as a profession? What might stop us from making this happen? The exciting Global Convention on Coaching (GCC), set up to discuss issues facing the professionalisation of coaching, could well use its participants’ vast experience to learn from the past and prepare its best scenarios for the future with something like a CCLL.
See “Firms sign up to GCC”, Coaching at Work, Vol 2, issue 5, and www.coachingconvention.org
Michael Carroll is an accredited executive coach and supervisor of executive coaches. He is director of the Centre for Supervision Training. mcarr1949@aol.com , www.supervisioncentre.com
Volume 2, Issue 6