27 Feb 2022
Last week I mentioned that I would jump into what a “debrief” looks like. The Debrief is an important tool to use that will assist in teaching critical thinking and instilling continuous learning principles with your students or even just in your life. I’ll touch on a few different concepts here to break down the debrief, including: the need for debriefing, the structure of debriefing, and the instructor’s job during a debriefing.
WHY:
The overall purpose of a debrief, in the simplest of terms, is to reconstruct an event so that one can figure out minute details about the rights and the wrongs in order to build lessons learned for the future. Again, what we want to do is to not make the same mistake twice and we want to take good data forward to keep practicing it and making it better.
Since there is a deep dive of everything that happened during the event, an element of “thick skin” must be applied to a debrief setting. This is the place where nobody has any rank in the room, and we all speak freely and openly in order to make us better as professionals.
Can we teach critical thinking in a debrief? Absolutely you can! The entire premise is to completely thing through problem sets in hindsight. So, you have to gather all of your clues and come up with solutions for future iterations. Then, in theory, you get to go try it again and see if it works. Figure 1 is my best illustration of the debrief process as it applies to critical thinking with a student. The student executes an event, they make a mistake or some mistakes, the execute a debrief, generate a lesson learned, get to re-do the event incorporating elements of their lesson learned… then, if the student doesn’t make the same mistake, they are out of this cycle until they make another mistake. And, since we aren’t perfect, this is basically a never-ending cycle that makes us all better!
STRUCTURE:
A good friend and colleague of mine used to break this structure down by saying that you are a detective, and you have to gather all of the clues to a mystery in order to solve it. I couldn’t think of any better way to frame our structure than to give you that. Thanks Beluga, (pseudonym and callsign of my colleague) you made it in the blog!
The debrief is best broken down into three separate parts. Truth Data Compilation/Reconstruction, debrief focus point development, and lesson learned presentation. These three parts are equally important, and they really can’t be skipped and must be completed in order. If you start doing it backwards than all you are doing is messing up your crime scene.
Phase I – Truth Data Compilation:
Approximate Duration: ~20-30 minutes
This portion is extremely important. The intent here is to gather all of your clues and only use facts. There is NO SPECULATION here and only fact-based data can be included. What is fact-based data? Well, that is data that comes from measuring instruments, notes taken during the mission from designated scribes, video cameras, voice recordings and many, many other tools. Basically, you would start from the beginning of your “event” at the start time and write down/record every single piece of data that is pertinent to the mission. Bonus points are awarded for data that is already incorporated into some sort of software program that does a lot of this for you. However, those are not the only options as I have A LOT of experience not having any of these tools. Here is an example for you from my experience:
After conducting a training mission where we used voice recorders and scribes to record important points throughout the mission you have arrived at the debrief. The first thing we must do is record all of the data that we all collectively have. So, we start from the beginning and the first event, whatever it was. For us, it was “Started movement and 1305L.” Awesome, we have a starting point and an event. We literally go from event to event through the timeline as we only write down things on a board that was recorded on a voice recorder or written by a scribe as an “important event” during the execution. As the subject matter expert for the event, you will know what is “important” and will need to make sure someone is recording those events. For us, it was “movement starts”, “contact made”, “aircraft checks on”, “briefing happens”, and “bomb is dropped” just to name a few.
Once you have made it through this process, it is time to move into the next phase and start to dive into the meat of your mission.
Phase II – Reconstruction & DFP Development
Approximate Duration: ~60 minutes
As Beluga would say, “we have all of our clues” now we need to make sense of all of them. That is the entire purpose of this phase of the debrief. We need to reconstruct the mission with only the facts to look at, except now, we get to figure out what everyone was thinking. During this entire phase we need to focus on the most important discrepancies in the event so that we do not repeat those next time. Those are the events that absolutely cannot be repeated the next time the student executes an event. We call those “Debrief Focus Points or DFPs” in the business. There should be a limit on the amount of these so that you can keep your phase timeline relatively low and keep interest of your students and others that are involved as well.
How do you figure out what your DFPs are? You are the subject matter expert, so you know those important parts of a mission and you know how long they are supposed to take or how well they are supposed to be executed. Find those parts in the data that is in front of you with your clues. Did it take to long? Did you not accomplish the intent of the task? Did you do something incorrect in the execution? Did you cause a lot of confusion with how you communicated things? All of those questions help you identify what is important to talk about. While you may want to focus on all of it, it just simply can’t be done while maintaining your cognition through it all. Find the events and friction points that will create the most learning and ensure that everyone has a technique that is executable the next time they step out on a mission.
Now that you know what your DFPs are you then all you need to do is talk through the event with the facts in front of you. Now is the point however, where you get to start asking others in the debrief what they were doing during this time and get a feel for the emotions of the situation. This is where some really good, guided discussion techniques and questioning techniques come into play to ensure your audience is participating and engaged. It also helps you discover the “feelings behind the facts.” Questions like, “it took us 8 minutes to get this data to user B, what was user A doing with that data for the 8 minutes? Can you walk us through your process user A?”
This is the most involved portion of the debrief and is truly where there is no rank in the room. The importance of this “rule” is that we can speak freely to each other and learn from each other. There is a temperament during this phase and an acute need for professionalism that has to be instilled in everyone in order for it to be successful. Emotions can happen, but the ability to get those emotions back to the facts and towards the goal of making everyone better has to be paramount. Sure, get your gloves out, put your mouthpiece in, but also be ready to shake hands and say good game at the end. Man, it is like all of those principles of being a life-long learner and expert teacher are coming back right here during this phase.
The clues we find along the way are called Contributing Factors. For each DFP there can be a ton of contributing factors, however, there is usually only one Root Cause. That is, with all of your clues, there is usually a single point at which the train truly left the tracks, and everything came unglued. While we aren’t trying to point out the Root Cause in this phase, we are trying to make sure that we get the contributing factors figured out, so we are building the whole case.
Phase III – Lesson Learned Presentation
Approximate Duration: ~20 minutes
Now that everyone has taken a bit of a beating and we figured out the contributing factors. The piece that you have to decide as the teacher and teach to everyone in the room, is the Root Cause for each DFP and explain, through your lesson learned, how to fix it in the future. The goal is to accomplish this for each DFP you have and teach a lesson for each one. This is also why I stated earlier that you need to make sure that you tailor the amount of DFPs that you have, or you are going to spend a couple of hours in this phase alone
There are several methods one could use for this presentation. The one piece of advice I have is to make sure that everyone in the room walks out with something that is actionable immediately upon leaving your lesson. That is, if someone walks out of the room and encounters the same situation you are teaching about, they should be able to use something from your lesson to ensure their success.
THE INSTRUCTORS JOB:
The best thing an instructor can do during the entire debrief process is to listen, guide, and take notes. You are as much a participant now as anyone else in the room. You only need to guide your student towards learning something. The best tool I can give any instructor for this is a process known as PDE.
What is PDE? Perception, Decision, Execution are the constant elements you should be assessing during the debrief to assist guiding your discussions moving forward.
Perception. When your student is walking through their mission in phase-II there is a requirement to make sure that the student perceived the problem correctly. Perception is by far the hardest thing to teach. If your student was not on the same page with you from the beginning, then they will probably make the wrong decisions and in doing so may execute things incorrectly as well.
Decision. If your student perceived the problem correctly but for some reason still didn’t accomplish the task correctly, the next step is their decision. Did they make the right decision? If so, then it can only leave us with execution. But if they didn’t make the right decision, we can now lead the line of questioning and guidance towards making the right decisions in the future.
Execution. If your student perceived the problem correctly and then made the right decision, that only leaves us with executing it incorrectly. This is by far, the easiest thing to teach. There is usually a checklist or a very specific way to execute the task. Now all we need to do is make sure that we lead the line of questioning and discussion towards executing the task correctly.
SUMMARY:
Okay, that is a quick introduction to the debrief. This has multiple applications throughout life in general. If you literally keep the same structure, you can find your own way of making this work out for you and your specific application, I am sure.
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