Try This Sailboat Exercise to Run Your Next Retrospective
Notable companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Spotify, and Netflix use retrospectives as a valuable practice for continuous improvement and team collaboration. Retros provide significant opportunities to learn, adjust, and improve. So often, learning opportunities go unnoticed.
What is a retrospective?
Retrospectives (AKA retros) are reflective exercises that allow you to improve over time by focusing on assessing and improving a system's components. It’s a structured and organized process used in various fields, particularly in project management, software development, and team collaboration, to analyze past events, experiences, or projects.
The primary goal of the retrospective is to gather insights that will help your team identify areas for improvement, celebrate successes, and make adjustments for future endeavors.
They say that experience is the best teacher. Truthfully, it’s only a great teacher if you’re a willing student.
Let’s go sailing
A great way to think about a retro is to think of a sailboat. The components are as follows:
- A destination: the goal that your team is moving toward
- Favorable winds: conditions, forces, and actions that push you toward progress
- An anchor: slows you down and holds you back
- Jagged rocks: dangerous, potentially hidden, risks that must be accounted for and avoided
Using this framework, you can build out a simple way to assess your work in the context of your goals.
Gather the team
When you begin to plan a retro, get the whole team involved. Anybody and everybody who is involved in the project should participate. The more angles and perspectives you include, the more holistic and comprehensive your insights will be.
In the context of your team’s goals, consider the actions or factors within your work. What are the winds for your boat? What are the anchors? Any submerged rock formations that stalled progress?
After you gather everybody’s takes, you equip yourself to answer the core question of how to improve.
- Winds: keep doing these things well to fuel progress
- Anchors: revamp or replace to either turn them into winds or make their weight more manageable if they cannot be eliminated
- Rocks: plan for risks and design a system that avoids or mitigates their impact
If you do this at the end of each major milestone or project, you can track and measure how your systems have improved over time.
Or sail alone
While there are great benefits when you retro with others, that doesn’t mean you can’t do this alone. You can retro smaller aspects of your personal life or specific working situation.
As an example, say you feel like you need to revamp your work for more focus. How can you retro that? Think about where you find flow, what distracts you, and what work environmental opportunities and challenges are in the way.
You could find that you feel the most focused in the morning when the office or house is quiet. During this time, you also have lots of energy. On the flip side, you are distracted most often by texts and emails. And you recognize that a rocky hazard for your productivity sailboat is hunger later in the day.
With this in mind, you make simple fixes. You shift your most mentally demanding tasks earlier in the day, during which time you turn your phone off and put it out of reach. You check your email at the top of each hour and only then. Finally, you make a point to have an afternoon snack to prevent a slip in focus later in the day.
This example showcases how retros aren’t bound to a specific area of life or work. Whether you're working with a billion-dollar client or just trying to focus a bit better, retros are highly effective to elicit improvements. The whole point is to find what’s working and what’s not and figure out how to move the weak points into opportunities.
What’s the big deal with retrospectives?
Notable companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Spotify, and Netflix use retrospectives as a valuable practice for continuous improvement and team collaboration. Retros provide significant opportunities to learn, adjust, and improve. So often, learning opportunities go unnoticed. This framework ensures that they’re brought to your attention and, better yet, acted upon.
Ready to explore the potential of retrospectives and elevate your product team's performance? Reach out to see how you could unlock value for your team.
