The Eye in the Sky Don’t Lie

“The eye in the sky don’t lie,” my high school football coach would say to us on Monday right before we would do game film review of the prior Saturday's game. This meant sitting in a dark room watching the good and bad plays with your entire team to review why we won or lost the game. 

Those words filled my entire body with dread because I knew if you hadn't "played your position," the entire team would watch that play...again & again & again. Then he would ask you, “Can you tell us what you were thinking?” Most of the time during the action, you weren't thinking - you were just reacting to how you trained. But now at game film review, you were thinking, and hopefully what you learned in that moment became how you reacted the next time you were in that situation. And if you didn't, you eventually wound up watching the next Saturday's game from the sidelines.

Similarly, every day we have thousands of "plays" that happen in our business - some small, some large, some successful, some not. Each "play" is an opportunity to learn, improve and build new instincts. In business there isn't an "eye in the sky" and while it's difficult to bring an entire global organization in a room each Monday, we can still create learning opportunities across teams. 

How can we do this? One way is to learn from the military and a practice they use called “after-action review” (AAR). The guiding principle is for the leader to "own" the results and to make the purpose of the discussion about learning, NOT assigning blame. 

AAR's are pretty simple, they revolve around five key questions. The hard part is having the discipline to do them, the honesty to find improvement areas and the courage to share the learnings so the rest of the organization can grow with you. The questions are:

• What was supposed to happen?
• What actually happened?
• Why were there differences?
• What worked, what didn’t and why?
• What might I do differently next time? 

The speed at which we move today combined with dispersed teams & increased complexity requires us to ask simple questions to hear the hard answers. It goes back to a conversation I had with Coach Caravetta who, over 30 years ago, would say, “Hard practices make easier games.” Which means our obligation to each other is to be more critical and ask the tough questions so that, in the end, we deliver our best performance.