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AAR’s or After Action Reports or rather after action discussions are not just for the professionals like police or military but for everyone. It is a necessary and required process to learn and change for success be it tactical in a military operation or to achieve a successful result in a business deal or business project. It is even an awesome process for self-analysis, self-synthesis and self-growth of our very lives.
AAR’s are referred to as critical discussions that involve not just those mistakes/errors of a project but the stuff that made you successful as if lessons to pass among your team, your group or your tribe. AAR’s have been mentioned in many of the articles I have read and in the books I have studied and even as an experience during my military days but I dropped them, outside self-analysis/self-synthesis processes, from my teaching, practicing and training in karate, martial arts and self-defense - a pretty big mistake.
A good Sensei, teacher and mentor would, should and does hold “Critical Discussions” of the training and practice as well as any actual experiences applying the skills with all who train and practice in their dojo. Both constructive and destructive as in deconstructing training and experiences to see what worked, what didn’t and why for both.
I suspect some actually go back over and review what was done in any given session but how many actually take the time as part of the training and practice session to do an overview, a review of the goals and objectives in the training, an analysis of the outcome from those sessions/lessons, an analysis of the performance of each critical tasks within those practices, a summary of the lessons and lessons learned along with some hands-on self-practice efforts for practitioners then finally recommendations to the entire group, dojo, from Sensei. The goal here is the identify problematic issues such as applicability toward self-defense vs. sport competitions, etc. and what needs should be addressed for improvements. Sensei and/or Dai-Sempai should propose methods and measures to counteract problems and obstacles to improvement, etc. Then there should be some method for both the dojo and the practitioner to record lessons learned for study and implementation into their practices and training let alone in some sub-routine/function our minds/brains will access in a clench out there for self-defense.
It comes down to an analysis of what was done, creating changes, a synthesis if you will, from the lessons learned and create new procedures, processes and actions from proper training and practice toward a more effective and efficient and proficient training, practice and most important actions in self-defense, sport competitions or even the philosophical way of the discipline (self-improvement way). If we are unable to make adjustments and changes along with recommendations then we will stagnate and end up with antiquated ineffective goals, tactics and strategies and when it comes to combatives and self-defense it exposes us to the greater probability of grave bodily harm and death.
I quote, “An after action report (or AAR) is any form of retrospective analysis on a given sequence of goal-oriented actions previously undertaken, generally by the author themselves.”
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