Good ideas for improving organisation and embedding continuous improvement can come from many sources, especially if your organisation has reached that critical mass where formality exceeds informality. A good one is imported from the military: the BAR and the AAR: the Before Action Review and the After Action Review. It sets a bar, creates a consensus and institutionalises improvements.
Some businesses take a more regimented approach, adopting a practice from the military. The U.S. Army is famous for its rigorous debriefings, known as after-action reviews, or AARs. To borrow the Army's definition, an AAR is "a professional discussion of an event, focused on performance standards, that enables soldiers to discover for themselves what happened, why it happened, and how to sustain strengths and improve on weaknesses."
Charles Parry, a partner at Signet Research & Consulting who teaches after-action reviewing to corporate clients, prefers the term action review cycle. That's because the process wraps around an entire "action," which might be as simple as a client meeting or as elaborate as a yearlong business-development project.
It provides a better process for dealing with clients and projects.