After Action Review as metalearning

Meta learning is originally described by Donald B. Maudsley (1979) as "the process by which learners become aware of and increasingly in control of habits of perception, inquiry, learning, and growth that they have internalized".

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_learning

Problem

Say, you are working on a project. For clarity, let it be you alone, using Trello and very simple Kanban-style board with Ideas/Pending/Doing/Review/Done collums.

Your project may go so-so, or even great, but you feel that you can do more, but you don't know how.

Principles

1. You can't improve what you can't measure
2. If "the best" process even exists, it's a moving target.
3. Focus on improving "here and now" instead of "chasing the ideal"
4. You have some process of dealing with Trello cards. It might be documented, or not. You may follow the documented one, or not. But there's one.

AAR as a solution

For those of you, with math background, the process is very similar to the simple gradient descent.

The process is very simple.

Say, you want small daily improvements.

So, at the beginning of the day, you set a daily goal. Goal should be well-formed or SMART. The simplest case would be something like "move card A from column Doing into column Review".

Please, do it in writing, so you won't fool yourself by the end of the day.

At the end of the day, you conduct simple excersise by answering 4 questions:

1. What was the goal?
   It's simple, since you have it written.

2. What's the actual result?
   It's simple again, because you have your Trello board on your screen and card A either changed the column or not.

3. What's the difference and why?
   This seems obvious but is usually tricky. If you've not achieved one of your goals, it's useful to consider that you've (a) lacked some scaleable resource or (b) your processes are underdefined or wrong. 5 Why's is a usefull routine to discover a root cause.

Remember, that the discovery should not be ideal. It's just enough to provide guidance towards the next step: the actionable decision.

1. What actionable decisions I can make?
   The key word here is actionable: Capable of being put into practice. In the context of this process this means a decision, that you either can implement right away (describe or detail your written process) or can set a well-formed SMART goal for the next day.

Conclusion

After action review is very simply yet astonishingly effective technique if you use it regularly.

Just remember that it doesn't tell you what to do. It's a meta-learning tool: it help you to learn how to do what you're wanting to achieve.