When people talk about “lessons learned,” most organizations imagine a post-project workshop or a form to complete at the end.

The military treats it very differently. In their world, reflection is not an add-on — it’s a rehearsed part of operational culture, and it happens immediately after an action, while the insight still has heat and memory hasn’t had time to tidy the story.

This is the After-Action Review (AAR).

It’s structured, it’s expected, and it’s done without blame.

The goal is simple: capture insight while it’s still useful, not when everyone has moved on and started rewriting events in their heads.

And because it’s the military, that culture isn’t left to chance — it’s drilled, standardized, and, unsurprisingly, supported by an entire 100-page handbook on how to review, record and feed lessons back into the system.

Not because they love paperwork (well, maybe a little bit), but because they understand that without a disciplined process, even the best insight evaporates.

If your organization has ever said, “We should capture that,” and then didn’t — this is the culture that solves that.