Pausing for learning: applying the after action review process at the NASA Goddard space flight center

NASA Goddard space flight center to adapt and deploy a learning process modeled after the after action review process used by the military. A process was established, early lessons observed, and an approach to roll-out developed. This paper introduces a concept for formalizing learning from NASA projects that is modeled on the Army after action review (AAR) process. While the AAR was developed to learn primarily from training exercises, it has 25 years of experience-base, theoretical foundations and practical tools that make it a valuable methodology for NASA to learn from. NASA has not paid as much attention to learning lessons from successes being instead overly focused on learning only from mistakes. Without a process for learning from every activity regardless of ultimate outcome, the agency risks missing out on the bulk of the learning from project work and potentially not really knowing the reasons behind the spectacular successes in addition to the root causes behind the failures. To distinguish the process at NASA from AAR it was given the descriptive name of "pausing for learning" or PFL. The idea is to create a learning event at the end of selected critical events in the life of a project. End of project or even end of mission reflections are good but are too infrequent for an organization like NASA to learn in a timely manner. Also much intermediate learning is lost between concept and launch. PFLs are integrated into the project life cycle at key points as natural parts of the process. Being facilitated and assembled by outsiders, the key project team members are only required to do a small amount of additional effort. This means that PFLs have the potential to deliver a very high value for a small investment in time and money. In addition to addressing learning needs of NASA, they are an attractive activity that projects have been willing to adopt.