 AARs are an important tool for all of us that work in a high-risk environment. To explain this further, let's go back to Mark Smith and listen to his thoughts on the use of after-action reviews. So the whole point of what an after-action review is supposed to look like is it's a very professional, very dynamic, candid discussion that is theoretically as much as humanly possible, supposed to transcend rank and position, that allows us to talk about what happened, what happened, what caused it to happen, why did those things get to the root cause of those things, and how do we do it better next time, how can we all improve. And the bottom line result is that everybody's part of the solution, not part of the problem, because they're fixing it at their level. So you're allowing innovation to occur within your organization right there at the ground level, or the air level, or the support level, or wherever this group of people is trying to improve. And if you can get 1% better every time you go out and do what it is you do, that's going to lead to a lot of success. It isn't accusatory. In other words, it's not meant as an investigation tool. It's meant as a learning tool. So if something occurs, for example, we go out and we incur a fatality or have some accident, that's not where we do an after-action review. Parts of people that weren't directly involved might do after-action reviews, but those people involved, that's appropriate for an investigation. It's not a disciplinary tool. So for example, we go out and I violate a standard, I violate policy to do something I want to do, or bad judgment, those kinds of things. That's the type of thing for disciplinary action. So we're not going to do an AAR where we're not trying to find fault with each other, we're just trying to improve. That's clearly a disciplinary issue and that's where we're going to deal with that. Now the crew or the team, the unit might get together and do an after-action review of the whole thing that led to that, but we're going to deal with Mark in a disciplinary fashion. Here is a tool that takes a minimum amount of time to do and gets you a maximum return as far as organizational learning and improved performance the very next day. Before we conclude this module, there is one more concept that we'd like to clarify a little better and that is the relationship between leaders' intent and objective strategies and tactics. To do this, we talk to Scott Anderson, who is currently the NWCG course developer trying to revise the training material for IC Type 3 and IC Type 4 courses. You know, I've been involved in the execution of a lot of tactical decision games recently and I've also been out on the fire line and I've been paying a lot of attention to how people are giving their briefings and if you look at the briefing checklist in the IRPG it refers to leaders' intent and it refers to overall objectives and strategy and then it talks about specific tactical assignments. Well I noticed when people were going through the checklist that they would get to those parts and they weren't really sure what they were supposed to do and so I couldn't understand why that was so difficult and so I started doing it myself and realized it is really difficult and I couldn't understand why so I started asking a lot of other people about the relationship between leaders' intent, strategy, I'm sorry, leaders' intent, objectives, strategy and tactics and it seemed like everybody I talked to had a different idea of how all these things were tied together and so myself and some other folks realized that we needed to come up with a clear definition of the relationship between all these elements and so what we decided was that we would define these things independently and try and tie them together so that they are usable for the firefighters. What we came up with is that leaders' intent is the big picture of what you're trying to accomplish as defined by task, purpose and end state. Objectives are the specific goals that you're trying to accomplish and we are trying to define that through an acronym called SMART. Your objectives should be specific, they should be measurable, they should be attainable, they should be realistic and they should be timely. Strategy is the plan that you're going to develop to attain your objectives and the tactics are the actions taken by resources in order to realize your strategic plan. So let me summarize that from the bottom up. Tactics are the actions taken by resources to realize the strategic plan. Strategy is the plan that you develop to attain your objectives and the objectives are a product of the leaders' intent that has been communicated to you and that you're communicating on down the line. So if you're a crew boss giving a briefing and you're running through the references in the briefing checklist and you come to the portion, it says leaders' intent, what are you supposed to do? Well, you have had leaders' intent communicated to you, hopefully, and it's been communicated to you in terms of task, purpose and end state. So the first thing you can do is tell your crew this is what success looks like and this is why we're doing this. The next thing you'll come to are the objectives and these objectives have been communicated to you. But remember as conditions change, the objectives may change also. And then you've also received a strategic plan. Well, the strategic plan is dependent on what the objectives are. So if the objectives evolve over the course of an operational period, your strategic plan may evolve over the operational period. And then you need to give your crew, this is really important, the specific tactical assignments because you are in control of the tactical actions that you take. And the reason you can do this is because you have been told what success looks like and why you're doing it. So that gives you the latitude to act independently to take advantage of opportunities or overcome barriers that you may encounter. What you want in that briefing, if you don't understand what success looks like and why you're doing something, it's your responsibility to ask those questions. I can think of lots of times when I've been on fires when I didn't understand what we were trying to accomplish and why we were doing it. How many times have you looked at one of your fellow crew members and asked, why are we doing this? Well, you should know that. It's not somebody else's fault. It's your fault if you don't know why you're doing something. If I'm a crew member, I need to keep in mind that I'm responsible for my own safety, really. And the only way that I can be responsible for my own safety is if I can act independently when it's appropriate. And the only way I can act independently is if I understand what success looks like and why we're doing this. You know, if I was to rewrite the briefing checklist, I think what I would do is I would communicate how the relationship is the important part between all these elements, not necessarily how they're independent pieces, but the fact that there's a relationship which starts with really broad general information that defines task purpose and end state and gives you a picture of success. And really these things mesh together quite a bit. And so it's really a challenge to pull them apart. And so with that in mind, I think I would develop this in a way that things, it wasn't implied that these are independent pieces of how you get your job done. To conclude this module, I wanna point out that if you're interested in learning more about leaders intent or AARs, there's a lot of additional material available. The leadership website would be a good place to start. If you're interested in specifically in learning more about AARs, there's a new video available which was just put together by the Lessons Learn Center and the NWCG Leadership Development Committee. To obtain a copy of that video, see the reference section of your student workbook. Also in the reference section, you'll find the website to the Lessons Learn Center where you can obtain copies of several past incident AARs. We encourage you to take advantage of these resources.