The "Reflectrospective"

On my current project, my team have been taking it turns to facilitate retrospectives every two weeks. However, I think one of the unintended consequences of this shared approach is that people didn't necessarily feel that planning their retrospective facilitation was a core part of their job, and therefore not much time was devoted to it. This resulted in a series of relatively similar retros, and I sensed in the past couple that boredom was creeping in. I therefore decided when it was my turn that it was time to freshen things up a bit.

I was looking at various retrospective templates as alternatives, and they all seemed to be variations on the theme of "what went well?" and "what didn't go well?". Those questions are the meat and drink of a retro, of course, but I didn't feel that any of the templates were sufficiently different from what we had been doing. My thoughts turned to the fact that we'd soon be handing the project over to another team, and how much I personally had learned during my time working on it. I thought that there was a pretty good chance others had picked up some interesting lessons that they would take on to future projects too. Perhaps it would be nice to reflect on our individual learnings as a team?

Thus the "reflectrospective" was born. I was a little apprehensive about how the team would feel about this drastically different approach to a retro, so I gave them a couple of days' warning and asked them to spend some time thinking about their learnings and, if they were willing, to be prepared to talk about one of them for a couple of minutes. When it came around to the event, I put the whiteboard software (this was a remote retro) into private mode and asked people to put their initials against their post-its if they were happy to share more about their learnings with the group. Given learning is a very personal, challenging process, I didn't want to put anybody on the spot. As it happened, everybody added their initials, and we took it in turns to speak.

It turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and illuminating retrospectives I've been part of, for a number of reasons. One was that it ensured all members of the team had the same amount of time to speak, which isn't always the case during a retrospective. Though our junior team members are actively encouraged to contribute to discussions, there are natually subjects on which more experienced team members will have more to share, but because the subject of this retro was more personal, everybody could take part fully.

Secondly, it naturally encouraged the team to make themselves vulnerable, because team members were able to acknowledge their earlier limitations in a safe space. I think this is extremely powerful, both in helping a team become more trusting, and in impressing upon junior team members that even people twenty and thirty years into their careers are still making mistakes and still learning from them. For me, being vulnerable with your teammates and learning that you can trust them to support you in that situation is the key factor in building an effective team.

Overall, I think the "reflectrospective" is something I will definitely use again. It would be particularly suitable after a big milestone has been hit, or perhaps straight after an inception. A couple of members of the team messaged afterwards to say how much they had enjoyed it, which was really satisfying. I think they all deserve a lot of credit for being brave enough to really engage with what I proposed and for sharing their observations on their personal growth in public. They're a great team and I'm going to miss working with them.