®
TRACE® identifies the human mechanisms that shape decisions, interactions and outcomes observed in real or simulated crisis situations. The method does not replace your after-action review: it gives it raw material and a reading grid, the same ones from one session to the next.
A crisis plays out through human mechanisms: perception, trade-offs, communication, cooperation. So it is people you need to be able to observe.
The after-action review, a legal requirement in many organizations, is almost always built from what participants recall several days later. Yet the memory of a high-pressure episode reconstructs itself, always in the same direction.
What ended up happening displaces what people believed at the time.
The account settles around the most confident version in the room.
Yet that is exactly where the decision was made.
® starts from the session itself, not from its recollection.Every session is captured on video and audio. Elite sport, the armed forces and civil protection have long done the same: you record, then you review together. We know that culture from the inside — our strategic committee and our partners come in part from those worlds.
You then review the session as it actually unfolded, rather than as it is remembered. That is where the decisions become readable: the real order of events, and what the team knew at each moment.
Added to this is what memory does not retain: response times, how information travels around the room, and the human factors and cognitive biases that weighed on the decisions. The terms of the debrief are agreed with you before the session.
A session produces a great deal of material and very few reference points. The five axes are there to read it the same way every time: each axis breaks down into criteria, and each criterion is read on a scale whose levels are described in advance.
Observe actions and how they unfold.
Identify the perceptions and interpretations that shape choices.
Understand internal dynamics and turning points.
Highlight strengths, weaknesses and room for improvement.
Project concrete, realistic improvements.
® is the method that produces it.Nothing you already produce disappears. What changes is what the debrief rests on, and what you can do with it six months later.
Participants' memory, collected several days after the session.
The video and audio capture of the session: the real sequence of exchanges and decisions.
The timeline and the gaps: what was done, what was missing, at what time.
The mechanisms that produced that timeline: perception, trade-offs, coordination, communication.
A grid specific to each event and to whoever wrote it up: two reviews eight months apart do not line up.
The same axes and the same scale at every session: the second reads against the first, and progress is itself one of the axes.
Recommendations, with no indication of the level at which to address them.
Situated recommendations: practices, the organization, or how decision-makers make their calls.
A feedback session, then a document. Both built on the capture, not on first impressions.
A session with the team, supported by sequences from the capture: you watch the moment together rather than recount it from memory.
The five axes filled in criterion by criterion, with the level observed and what establishes it in the session.
The RETEX written up, usable as it stands in your governance bodies and reporting obligations.
Recommendations sorted by level of intervention, with what will have to be verified at the next session.
A TRACE® finding is not always addressed in the same place. Sometimes in practices and procedures, sometimes in the way the organization coordinates, sometimes in the way decision-makers make their calls — and often in all three at once.
Adjustments to key practices, methods and coordination.
Strategic review: audit, governance, roles, business continuity/recovery plans.
Decision-maker coaching, complementary training, support for transformation.
An exercise coming up, or a recent crisis to analyse?
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® analysis
