In two recent blogs, we wrote about some of the key matters that practice leadership should consider in advance of engaging a consultant and the factors that influence the outcome of an active project. In our final blog in this series, we address how organizations can ensure the successful adoption of recommendations once the consulting engagement has concluded. The period following an active consulting project is critical to maintain momentum, harness the energy and enthusiasm from collective work and translate it into action. The executive or senior team within the organization who sponsored the consultation will want to convene a session of the project team to debrief on the engagement. Participants in the debrief can share their experience, discuss their understanding of the findings and recommendations, and define plans for implementing initiatives to fulfill the objectives of the project. A valuable exercise during the debrief meeting is to conduct an after-action review. The method can be useful not only when there has been a failure, but also when there has been a success, so as to hopefully repeat the success and apply lessons learned to other situations. In its most basic form, an after-action review seeks to find answers to four key sets of questions: 1. What was supposed to happen? What was planned? 2. What actually did happen? What were the results? 3. there a difference between what was planned and the actual results? Why or why not? 4. What can we learn from this? What do we want to continue/sustain? What should we do differently next time? Reflecting on the project through an after-action review allows the team to organize their experience with the consultation and to share meaningful feedback with the consultant.