After Action Review

What is an After Action Review?

An After Action Review (AAR) is a structured way for teams to pause, reflect, and learn after completing a project, event, or significant activity. The U.S. Army developed this methodology back in the 1970s, and it has since spread to become one of the most widely adopted organizational learning tools. You'll find teams using it everywhere from hospital emergency rooms to software development shops.

What sets an AAR apart from a standard debrief or retrospective is its specific focus on the gap between what you planned and what actually occurred. The process also tends to be explicitly blame-free. Rather than pointing fingers at individuals, teams examine processes and systems, which helps people feel safe enough to be honest about what went wrong.

The real strength of an After Action Review is how simple it is. Four questions sit at the heart of it: What was supposed to happen? What actually happened? Why the difference? And what can we learn? When teams commit to asking these questions consistently, every experience becomes a chance for process improvement.

Key Characteristics of After Action Review

• Blame-Free Environment: The emphasis stays on processes and systems, not individuals. This creates the psychological safety people need to actually talk openly about failures and missteps.
• Structured Reflection: AARs use a consistent framework built around those four core questions. This keeps conversations focused and prevents them from spiraling into hours-long complaint sessions.
• Immediate Application: These aren't lengthy post-project reports that gather dust. AARs happen soon after an event, sometimes even during ongoing work, so the details are still fresh and teams can act on insights quickly.
• Participatory Learning: Everyone involved in the activity joins the discussion. This shared exploration of both successes and failures builds collective understanding across the team.
• Actionable Outcomes: A good AAR produces specific lessons learned and documented improvement actions. You walk away with something concrete you can apply next time, not just abstract takeaways.

After Action Review Examples

Example 1: Product Launch Post-Mortem

A software company runs an AAR after launching a new feature that went down unexpectedly during its first day live. As the team works through what happened, they realize the technical documentation was solid, but the handoff between development and customer support had gaps. Nobody on support knew the feature well enough to troubleshoot basic issues. The result? A new launch checklist that builds in proper knowledge transfer before any go-live date.

Example 2: Marketing Campaign Review

After a social media campaign wraps up, the marketing team gathers for an AAR. The campaign crushed engagement targets but blew past the budget. Looking at the details, they discover that an unplanned influencer partnership drove most of the success, while a flurry of last-minute creative revisions ate up the extra spending. From this, they build out new approval processes for budget changes and a framework for spotting partnership opportunities earlier in planning.

Example 3: Emergency Response Debrief

Following a mock emergency drill, a hospital brings together staff for an AAR. Medical personnel responded quickly, which was good. But the review surfaces a problem: communication between departments broke down because contact lists were out of date. The team leaves with two action items: quarterly contact list audits and updated cross-departmental communication protocols.

After Action Review vs Retrospective

Both AARs and retrospectives help teams reflect and improve, but they have different purposes and structures.

How Glitter AI Helps with After Action Reviews

Glitter AI makes the AAR process more practical by giving teams a straightforward way to capture and share lessons learned. Instead of relying on scattered meeting notes or scheduling yet another long meeting, you can create visual documentation during or right after a project using screen recordings with voiceover annotations.

The platform lets you document critical project moments through screen captures and video walkthroughs. You can then organize these insights into searchable knowledge base articles that future teams can actually find and reference. This turns what might otherwise be a one-time AAR conversation into lasting organizational knowledge. Teams stop repeating the same mistakes and can more easily build on what worked before.