After Action Review (AAR)? – WTF – Terminology and Context Actually Matters

Today, the Orange County Fire Authority has published the above document on the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned website. While the document has some great info and lessons learned, they (ORC) are completely missing out on what an After Action Review (AAR) actually is. HERE is the Orange County report from the Station Fire.

• Call it an Incident Review 
• Call it a Facilitated Learning Analysis (FLA) 
• Call it an Accident Prevention Analysis (APA) / Lessons Learned Analysis (LLA)  
• Call it a Serious Accident Investigation (SAI) or Serious Accident Review (SAR)
• Call it Story Telling by the folks who were there
  

… But, PLEASE don’t call it or confuse it with an After Action Review (AAR). 

The report from the Orange County Fire Authority is a great document with lessons learned for the wildland firefighting community….. but it is not an AAR. The terms used are not interchangeable nor intended to be. Calling it an AAR, greatly injures and detracts from the successful AAR process(es) that are/have become the cornerstones in wildland fire lessons learned and information sharing “within the unit”, and rolled up as appropriate. The lessons learned from an AAR only take a few sentences…. or maybe a few paragraphs at the most to explain… and LEARN from.

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