What is after action review what went well?

After action review what went well is a concept in personal epistemology: Understanding what you did right is as valuable as understanding what went wrong.

Example: A product team ships a feature that exceeds every adoption metric by a factor of three. In the sprint retrospective, the facilitator says "Great work, moving on" and spends forty-five minutes dissecting the two bugs that slipped through QA. Six months later, the team ships another feature — but this one lands flat. Nobody can explain why the first feature succeeded because nobody studied it. The conditions that produced the hit were never identified, never documented, never deliberately reproduced. The team treated the success as a gift and the failure as a lesson. They learned from the failure and wasted the success. A different team across the hall runs a success review on their best quarter. They discover three specific patterns: the project had a single clear owner with decision authority, the customer research happened before the spec rather than after, and the launch included a two-week soft rollout that generated early feedback. None of these patterns were company policy. They were choices this team made, and until the success review surfaced them, even the team members who made those choices could not have articulated why they mattered. The success review converted tacit luck into explicit strategy. Within a year, those three patterns became the team s default operating procedure — not because management mandated them, but because the team understood why they worked.

This concept is part of Phase 45 (Review and Reflection) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for review and reflection.