After-Action Review - Look Forward
An AAR is about "standing in the future and looking back"
Tan Qiao (yes, the famous Officer Tan from Chenghua Avenue) posted a video on Bilibili titled "The most real voice that moved tens of millions: 'Look forward'". It recorded a deep conversation he had with an elderly man in 2011. What touched people most was the man's simple but powerful line: "look forward."
Yes, life requires us to keep looking forward. Stand in the future, and be a friend of time.
That made me think: in our day-to-day work, after-action reviews also need to "look forward." But why?
1. The Common AAR Mindset
An AAR often turns into "find the cause and the problem." This mindset stays focused on the past, asking why things happened and what went wrong. It is not that this is always bad, but most of the time it produces negative outcomes.
In practice, an AAR easily becomes a blame meeting: arguing about "whose fault it was," ending with rising emotional entropy and low morale. It is like repeatedly picking at a scab. It does not heal; it only makes the wound harder to close.
2. A Future-Oriented AAR
An AAR is not only about asking, "what did we do?" It should be about the future: "what will what we experienced help us do next?"
I call this "stand in the future, look back at the present." Focus on the future and ask: after this happened, what can we do now?
Concretely, it means:
- Extract reusable experience
- What patterns can we reuse?
- What blind spots need early-warning mechanisms?
- Turn lessons into action
- How do we prevent similar issues next time?
- What processes or decision models should we improve?
- Spot opportunities
- What improvement space did this reveal?
- How can we convert lessons into competitive advantage?
Looking forward in an AAR also reduces endless self-attack and criticism over past mistakes—for both yourself and others.
3. Be a Friend of Time
Only when an AAR helps the future does it become being a friend of time, producing three positive effects:
- Compounding time: experience becomes a decision knowledge base
- Emotion management: less internal friction and blame
- Faster growth: mistakes become steps upward
"What will everything we experienced help us with in the future?"
This question is the key standard that separates effective AARs from performative ones.
4. Takeaways
- Accept imperfection: mistakes and detours are part of success; they are the price of cognitive upgrades.
- Be a friend of time: accept and review seriously, then look forward for direction, and compound over time.
As that elderly man stayed open-minded after many hardships, true wisdom is not obsessing over "why it failed," but thinking "how failure becomes fuel." That may be the deepest practice behind "look forward."
Begin with the end in mind, and you will get both beginning and end.