After an event or project, all the stakeholders come together to celebrate the successes of the project, and learn from failure in a constructive manner without finger-pointing. After a retrospective participants have concrete actions for the next event or project, and can contain broader organisational change.
Retrospective benefits:
- Closure
- Learning from our own mistakes
- Learning from someone else's mistakes
- Acknowledging aligned practices and accomplishments
- Rewriting organizational stories
- Learning a healthy ritual
- Discovering strengths of the organization
- Clarifying aligned roles for players
- Allowing to connect emotionally
- Challenging each others assumptions
- Providing an overview of what's actually happening in the organization
- Building trust across boundaries
- Clear results, that lead to realistic commitments
Retrospective risks:
- Emotional upset
- Unrealized expectations
- Lack of follow up leading to frustration and distrust
- Last minute sabotage
- Repercussions and retaliations
- Loss of control at the top
- Increase in awareness of personal responsibilities and accountability
- And of the chasm between responsibilities and accountability
- Can be a life style changing event
- Discovering that you waited too long to do aretrospective
- Discovering some of your assumptions are invalid
Risks of not doing retrospectives:
- Emotional upset piles up
- Repeating mistakes over and over again
- Carrying forward unhealthy relationships
- Not using an opportunity for sustaining and reinforcing best practices
- Lack of adaptivity
- Less access to hidden wisdom
- Not having your assumptions challenged
- Would have could have should have thinking
- Learning organization is not learning
- Getting stuck in causality loops
- Less access to hidden resources
Retrospectives can provide lessons on architecture, planning, communication, product information flow and possible early intervention points.
The more tangible, tonal product of this choreography is a report to management by participants, closing feedback loops with recommendations and concrete actions.
I facilitate retrospectives and the introduction of this practice in organizations. For more details, please contact me or members from the retrospective facilitators.
History
I learnt how do to retrospectives through Nynke Fokma and my own experiences. Retrospectives employ techniques from the work of Virginia Satir and Gerald M. Weinberg.
