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Continuous Debriefing - Both hot and cold
As we’ve covered in previous articles, learning involves the gradual reduction of error, like a sniffer dog slowly feathering towards the scent we sniff out our goals. This process involves recognising when we’re losing the scent, and adjusting our course to cater for this. This process of continuously assessing, analysing, reflecting and learning is all based upon a single skill that various high performance organisations have implemented, with this skill being a key part central of my work as a sport psychologist….that skill is continuous debriefing.
Continuous debriefing does not mean holding lengthly debriefs following small period of activity. Instead, debriefs can be small, practical processes that allow individuals and teams to quickly determine if they need to change course to achieve their goals.
These debriefs may be “hot” (i.e. close to the action, when emotions are running high), or they can be “cold” debriefs (which typically take pace some time after the “action” to give us more emotional distance from the event and allow us to think more logically). Both “hot” and “cold” debriefs are vital and form the start and end of the “green” stage of the learning cycle (see previous article on “Elite Learners”).
This approach is based upon a technique developed by the US Military called After Action Reviews1. After actions reviews involves the individual or team exploring 4 key questions / stages:
1. What specifically, am I trying to achieve here?At this stage it’s critical that you have your goals clearly set – for instance, you need to know exactly what you or your student is trying to achieve within a training session. These goals need to be well formed, establishing the key evidence that tells you/them that the goal is achieved. | |
2. What is actually happening?This stage involves identifying the “base reality” – not what you think is happening, but what is actually happening. What have you seen / heard / felt? What has someone actually done? We’re really looking at behaviours whenever possible, but we may need to include feelings, particularly within the “hot” debrief. | |
3. What caused the gap between my / our answer to question 1 and question 2?It may be that there is not gap, and you’re perfectly on track to achieving your goal – if so, that’s good news and you don’t need to dig any further. If you’re not totally achieving your goals, we now need to explore the cause of this. Once we identify the cause of the gap (e.g. our simple answer might be something like “nerves”), we might even go back to stage 1 and ask “What am I trying to achieve with respect to my nerves?”, stage 2 “What is actually happening with my nerves?”, and stage 3 “What’s causing the gap?” – in doing this, we start identifying and clarifying the causal chain of feelings, behaviours, thoughts, etc. | |
4. What am I learning here?This is potentially the most powerful question of all, and ensures that we take some key learning from this cycle to feed into our next stage of planning.
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Whilst this framework is extremely simple, its also extremely robust, and it gets to the heart of a learning situation very quickly. It can be used as an approach within athlete centred coaching, whilst working with teams, or even simply on yourself. I’d encourage each of us to become continuous debriefers, in our journey towards becoming Elite Learners.
