from after-action to in-action review

I did the opening keynote at KM Australia this morning. A good sized audience and great feedback. They also have a meeting place where I have been settled for the day catching up on email and RSS feeds, and having lots and lots of interesting conversations. Its a good idea, a lot of people find it difficult to ask questions after a keynote, but here they join in on conversations, see that you are open to anyone and join in. Its those exchanges that are amongst the most valuable.

One of the strong points I made is that we need to move away from after-action reviews, written up as case studies. Such an approach encourages retrospective coherence, the benefits of hindsight. The resultant cases studies may impress management but they are too far down the context specific codification review to have any sustainable impact. Instead we need (or so I think) to aim for continuous capture of fragmented narrative based learning, captured as people learn, not a few days later. The access to that material is then also in-action, assembling and blending the fragments in the context of need.