The After-Action Review: Why Your Proposal Team Needs One
In the Army, no mission was complete without an After-Action Review (AAR), or in plain terms, a debrief. Win, lose, or somewhere in between, you stop and look back before you move on to the next thing. It’s a discipline that stuck with me long after I left the service. As proposal professionals, that’s something we understand well.
One way proposal professionals look back with intention is through our review of the proposal process after we submit. Whether we call it lessons learned or an AAR, the concept is the same: what worked, what didn’t, and how do we improve? The AAR has its roots in the U.S. Army, which developed it to help units learn from every mission. The principle translates directly to our world. Every proposal, win or lose, has something to teach us.
The Issue
We understand the need for the AAR, but many of us don’t implement it as regularly as we should. Ideally, we conduct one after every proposal submission. The reality is we’re far more likely to do it after a loss than a win. That’s human nature. But skipping the debrief on a win means missing lessons that could help you replicate that success, and that’s a missed opportunity.
So, how do we build an AAR process that sticks?
The Case for the After-Action Review
The AAR gives everyone involved in a proposal the opportunity to learn from it together. And when a team learns together, everyone gets better on the next effort. Not just the proposal manager, but the subject matter experts, the reviewers, the coordinators. The collective knowledge stays in the room instead of walking out the door.
One Approach to Conducting an After-Action Review
AARs became a lot less dreadful for me after I was introduced to a better way of running them. My boss at the time had a simple but deliberate structure. He went around the room and asked everyone one question at a time:
- What worked?
- What didn’t work?
- How do we improve?
He didn’t ask all three at once. He went around the room on the first question, and we captured every answer. Then he went around again on the second. Only after both rounds did we turn to identifying action items for improvement.
What made this approach so effective was starting with what worked. This anchors the conversation in the positive first. The wins, the things that went right. Then, when you turn to what didn’t work, the tone is already set. People are less defensive. The conversation is less likely to deteriorate into finger-pointing and blame. Even when there’s more negative than positive on the table, and sometimes there is, starting with the wins keeps the meeting productive.
Over time I’ve evolved this approach to include a simple slide deck. Before the meeting, the proposal manager adds a few bullets to each slide, so nothing starts from blank. Then we go around the room and capture comments directly in PowerPoint. It keeps the meeting moving and produces a document that can be referenced and shared before the next proposal.
Making It Stick
The secret to making the AAR a consistent part of your process is treating it like any other milestone: be deliberate about it. Put it in the proposal schedule from day one. Get team buy-in early. And put it on everyone’s calendar at the kickoff, because if it’s on the calendar from the beginning, it’s far more likely to happen than if you’re trying to schedule it after submission when everyone is already mentally on to the next thing.
Win or lose, there’s always something worth learning. The AAR is how you make sure that learning doesn’t get left behind.
I’d love to hear how you conduct an AAR. Share your approach in the comments.
