A former CEO with special-ops experience ran eight increasingly successful events by holding after-action reviews after each one. He gathered the team to discuss what worked, what failed, and what to fix next time. Most high-profile teams skip this, relying on luck or bigger budgets instead.
At the last company that I was CEO at, we had 8 events back to back and each one was more successful than the last. And it wasn't because the face of the company went viral overnight and had hundreds of thousands of millions of followers and impressions, or we spent way more money. It was because I brought something in from my background in special operations, which is an after-action review. After every mission, you sit down with everybody and you go over what went right, what went wrong. Now, most teams that I've seen, even ones that are extremely sort of high level, right, don't do this. I've run events and things in the past and I've begged these huge businesses with monster-level influencers who teach business just to do this one basic thing. And it goes ignored most of the time because work is hard and people suck, right? If you have an after-action review, you get everyone in their department and you go, what went right, what went wrong, and what are the things that we need to fix for the next time? But what this ensures is that you don't consistently make the same mistakes over and over again. You actually have a way to have incremental increases and make things better little bit by little bit so you can have more success each time. So an after-action review forces reality. You capture all the lessons while they're fresh. You turn experience into systems. And you make improvement inevitable. Success is not luck. It's just documented iteration.
