Certified: The GIAC GCIL Audio Course

In this episode, we’re going to focus on what separates organizations that keep repeating the same painful incidents from organizations that steadily get better: turning lessons learned into real capability. Beginners often hear phrases like lessons learned and after-action review and imagine a meeting where people talk about what happened and then move on. But a real After-Action Review (A A R) is not a storytelling session, and it is not a blame ritual. It is a disciplined process for converting a chaotic event into usable knowledge, and then converting that knowledge into specific improvements that make the next incident smaller, shorter, or easier to manage. Without that follow-through, incidents become exhausting because every new incident feels like the first time. With follow-through, each incident becomes an investment in readiness, even if it was unpleasant. The goal here is to help you understand what an A A R is, how to run one in a way that produces truth, and how to drive the follow-through that makes improvements real rather than promised.

The first big idea is that you can’t improve what you can’t describe accurately, which is why the A A R begins with building a shared, evidence-based understanding of what happened. In the heat of response, people hold different pieces of information, and they also hold emotions, stress, and assumptions that can distort memory. An A A R works best when it is grounded in records, like timelines, task tracking notes, communications summaries, and key evidence points that were collected during the incident. This doesn’t mean the A A R becomes a technical deep dive; it means the conversation is anchored to facts rather than impressions. If you skip this anchoring, the review becomes a debate about what people think happened, and the loudest voice often wins, which creates false lessons. A strong incident leader protects the A A R from that by insisting on clarity about what is confirmed, what is inferred, and what is unknown. This approach also reduces conflict, because people are less likely to argue when the review is guided by shared evidence.

A useful way to understand an A A R is to think of it as answering four practical questions in a disciplined order. What happened is the factual narrative, built from the timeline and supported by evidence rather than memory alone. What was supposed to happen is the intended plan, such as what policies, playbooks, roles, and escalation paths said should occur. What actually happened compared to that plan reveals gaps, which are the differences between the intended response and the real response. What should change next is the improvement plan, which must be concrete and owned. You do not have to treat these as a formal template, but you do need that flow, because it prevents jumping straight into blame or jumping straight into solutions without understanding the real causes. Beginners often want to skip to fixes because it feels productive, but fixes that do not match the true failure points often create new problems. The A A R’s job is to identify the failure points precisely so the fixes actually matter.

One of the most important distinctions in A A R work is the difference between root cause and contributing factors, because incidents rarely have a single simple cause. Root cause is the underlying reason the incident was possible, such as a vulnerability that was not patched, access that was too broad, or monitoring that failed to detect early signs. Contributing factors are the conditions that made the incident worse or harder to handle, such as unclear roles, delayed escalation, poor logging coverage, or inconsistent communication. A common beginner mistake is to treat the first thing they notice as the root cause, like saying a phishing email caused the incident, when the deeper cause might be weak identity controls or lack of training. Another common mistake is to focus only on technical causes and ignore process causes, like handoff failures or missing preapproved decisions. A mature A A R looks at both, because technical issues and process issues interact. For example, weak logging might not cause the initial compromise, but it can cause delayed detection and expanded damage. The exam often rewards this kind of balanced thinking because it reflects how real improvement happens.

Psychological safety is essential to making A A R findings truthful, because people won’t share mistakes or uncertainty if they fear humiliation. Incidents are stressful, and responders often make decisions under partial information, so some mistakes are almost inevitable. If the A A R becomes a blame session, people learn to protect themselves rather than protect the organization, and that destroys learning. A good incident leader sets the tone by focusing on systems and decisions rather than personal attacks, and by separating the review from performance evaluation. That does not mean accountability disappears; it means accountability is handled thoughtfully and based on evidence, not on emotion. It also means the leader encourages honesty about what was confusing or unclear, because confusion is a critical signal of where readiness is weak. When people can say, we didn’t know who could approve isolation, or we didn’t know where the source of truth was, you have discovered a real improvement target. Without psychological safety, those truths stay hidden and the same failure repeats.

Now let’s talk about the most common trap: the A A R that produces a long list of lessons with no follow-through. This happens when improvements are vague, unowned, or disconnected from measurable outcomes. For an improvement to become capability, it must be converted into a specific action, assigned to an owner, and given a realistic deadline. It should also include a definition of done, meaning what completion looks like in verifiable terms. For example, improve logging is vague, but enable and validate logging coverage for critical authentication events across identified systems is more concrete. Update playbooks is vague, but revise the account compromise playbook to include specific escalation triggers and communication approval steps is more actionable. The leader’s job is to prevent the review from ending with hopeful statements and to insist on an action plan that can actually be executed. This ties back to incident tracking and ownership skills, because follow-through is essentially an incident-style task list, just for improvement work. If the organization can manage an incident task list, it can manage an improvement task list, but only if leadership insists.

A useful way to choose what to fix first is to prioritize improvements by impact and recurrence. Some gaps are annoying but minor, while others can cause major harm if repeated. Some gaps are rare, while others occur in almost every incident, like unclear handoffs or inconsistent status updates. A mature approach prioritizes improvements that reduce the most damaging outcomes and that appear repeatedly across events. This is also where skills matrices and training connect, because some improvements are not technical changes, they are capability changes in people and process. If the A A R shows that escalation was delayed because people didn’t understand triggers, the fix might be training and a just-in-time refresher, not a new tool. If the A A R shows that recovery was slow because asset ownership was unclear, the fix might be improving asset visibility and ownership records. When you prioritize this way, you avoid chasing interesting but low-value changes. The exam may test this kind of prioritization indirectly by asking what should be done after an incident, and the best answer often focuses on high-impact, repeatable improvements.

Follow-through also requires measurement, because without measurement you cannot tell whether the capability improved. Measurement does not need to be complicated, but it needs to be meaningful. If you improve backups, you can measure whether restore tests succeed and how long critical services take to restore. If you improve logging, you can measure whether key systems produce the needed events and whether timeline building becomes faster and more accurate. If you improve communications, you can measure whether updates are consistent and whether stakeholders report fewer contradictions and fewer surprises. Measurement matters because it protects improvements from becoming check-the-box work, and it provides evidence that investments are paying off. It also supports future decision-making, because leaders can justify continued readiness work when they can demonstrate that it reduces incident impact. For beginners, the message is that capability is not a feeling, it’s a repeatable outcome, and measurement helps you confirm repeatability.

Another critical part of follow-through is updating the artifacts that shape future behavior, such as policies, playbooks, preapproved decisions, contact lists, and training materials. If the A A R reveals a gap but the artifacts remain unchanged, the organization will default back to old habits during the next incident. Updating artifacts is how you encode learning into the system so that new team members and future responders inherit better guidance. This also reduces reliance on individual memory, which is unreliable under stress. For example, if the A A R shows that evidence handling was inconsistent, the playbook should be updated to include clear evidence preservation expectations and who owns that function. If the A A R shows that handoffs failed, the process for shift change should be clarified and practiced. When artifacts are updated, you are not only fixing a problem, you are preventing the problem from reappearing because the system now guides people toward better behavior. This is how lessons become capability rather than just stories.

It’s also important to understand that improvements compete with normal work, and that is why leadership commitment matters. After an incident, people often return to regular responsibilities, and improvement tasks get postponed because they feel less urgent than daily operations. But postponing improvements keeps the organization vulnerable and increases the chance of repeating the incident. A strong leader treats improvement work as part of operational responsibility, not as optional extra credit. That means scheduling time, assigning owners, and tracking progress until completion. It also means making hard choices about what to stop doing so improvement work can happen, because time is finite. This is one reason follow-through is considered a leadership skill; it requires discipline, prioritization, and persistence beyond the emotional peak of the incident. In exam scenarios, a leadership-minded answer often includes ensuring that lessons are converted into owned actions and that progress is tracked, because that reflects real-world capability building.

Another subtle but important point is that A A R outcomes should include what went well, not just what went wrong, because preserving strengths is part of capability. If a team communicated clearly, escalated appropriately, or contained quickly, those successes should be identified and understood. The goal is not to celebrate for its own sake, but to recognize which practices worked so they can be repeated and taught. Sometimes success occurs by luck, like having a key expert available at the right moment, and the A A R can reveal that reliance and inspire building redundancy so success becomes less dependent on luck. Other times success occurs because a playbook was clear or because logging provided fast clarity, and those factors should be protected and extended. When you include positives, you also improve morale and psychological safety, which increases willingness to engage honestly in future reviews. Beginners can understand this as maintaining what works while fixing what fails, because both are necessary. An organization that only focuses on failures can become cynical and exhausted, which harms long-term readiness.

To close, turning lessons learned into capability requires both a disciplined After-Action Review and disciplined follow-through. The A A R builds an evidence-based understanding of what happened, compares it to what was supposed to happen, identifies root causes and contributing factors, and then translates findings into concrete improvements. Follow-through makes those improvements real by assigning owners, setting deadlines, defining what done means, updating the artifacts that guide future response, and measuring whether capability actually improved. Psychological safety matters because truth is the fuel of learning, and blame shuts truth down. Prioritization matters because not every lesson deserves equal effort, and leadership must focus on changes that reduce impact and recurrence. When you treat each incident and each exercise as an opportunity to strengthen the system, you build an organization that responds with more clarity and less chaos over time. That is the core of incident leadership maturity, and it is exactly what the GCIL incident leader role is designed to measure.