The team debrief
Use it with your team
The grid, with room to write in every box, followed by a page on the research behind it. Fill it in on screen or print it.
The grid
OFTEN TALKED ABOUT · MOVES THE OUTCOME
What goes here
What the team talked about that also moves the outcome. See the research
What to do
This is step 4. See the research
SELDOM TALKED ABOUT · MOVES THE OUTCOME
What goes here
What moves the outcome and never came up in the cycle’s meetings. See the research
What to do
This is steps 5 and 6. See the research
OFTEN TALKED ABOUT · DOES NOT MOVE THE OUTCOME
What goes here
What came up often in meetings and does not move the outcome. See the research
What to do
Check where the team’s measure from step 2 ended up. A measure in this box can improve while the outcome stays put. See the research
SELDOM TALKED ABOUT · DOES NOT MOVE THE OUTCOME
What goes here
Things nobody raised that also do not move the outcome.
What to do
Leave them off the next cycle’s list.
Select a box to see what goes there and what to do with it.
Six steps
Start by writing your outcome at the top of the sheet. For example, third grade reading proficiency on the spring state test, or the share of ninth graders who miss 10 percent or more of school days.
What you talked about.
List what came up most in the cycle’s meetings, including the reasons things did or did not happen.
What you measured.
Write down the measure the team reported.
Place them.
Put each item in a box. Expect much of it to end up on the right side.
Look at the top right.
Is anything there? If it is empty, that is the finding. Leave it empty.
What nobody raised.
In the top left, write what moves the outcome and never came up.
Choose what to measure next.
Pick one item from the top left. Name how the team will measure it in the next cycle, and who will own it.
Adapted from Matthew Stagner’s piece, Programs Need Continuous Learning, Not Just Evaluation.
What the research says
Open a line to see the research behind it.
A structured look back improves what teams do next.
Tannenbaum and Cerasoli’s meta-analysis of 46 samples found that debriefs, also called after-action reviews, improved performance by about 25 percent on average over control groups. The effect held for teams and individuals, and the authors point to alignment, facilitation, and structure as what makes a debrief work.
- Tannenbaum, S. I., & Cerasoli, C. P. (2013). Do team and individual debriefs enhance performance? A meta-analysis. Human Factors, 55(1), 231–245. Source
The problems that come up most may not be the ones that matter most.
Tversky and Kahneman showed that people judge how frequent or likely something is by how easily examples come to mind, which they called the availability heuristic. The grid applies that finding to a cycle’s meetings by separating how much something was talked about from how much it moves the outcome.
- Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207–232. Source
A measure can improve while the outcome stays put.
Campbell warned that “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” The busy quadrant is where that shows up in a cycle, when the team’s measure improves and the outcome does not.
- Campbell, D. T. (1979). Assessing the impact of planned social change. Evaluation and Program Planning, 2(1), 67–90. Source
See the system that produces the outcome.
Bryk and colleagues list “see the system that produces the current outcomes” and “we cannot improve at scale what we cannot measure” among their six principles of improvement. The grid’s last step, choosing one thing to measure next and naming who owns it, follows from both.
- Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L. M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P. G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America’s schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press.
Whether people raise something depends on the team.
Edmondson found that team psychological safety is associated with learning behavior, and that learning behavior mediates between safety and performance. Step 5 asks the team to name what never came up, which depends on people feeling able to say it.
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. Source
This tool can also run as a full-day session with your team. See ways to work together.
If your team is looking back on a cycle, I would love to hear about it.
Send a short note about the program or question and the decision you are facing.
I read every note myself and reply within the week.