Retrospect Yo'Self

You know how some weeks suck, and you want them to suck less in the future? We all have those weeks. Turns out, retrospectives can help fix our woes, and they’re kind of cool.

What is a Retrospective?

A retrospective (or “retro”) is basically a team’s internal review of the work weeks since your last retrospective; we have them every 2-3 weeks. Here you will gather your team, review what things went well, what things didn’t, and propose solutions to fix any problems mentioned. Sounds simple, right?

It should be obvious that when your team works together to fix your collective frustrations, you can often…you know, fix them. In itself, this makes retros invaluable to any moderately-sized team. But retrospectives can do more than that! If you iterate on this process every few weeks to continually improve how you work, just think of the utopia your workplace could become after only a few months. To add to the awesome, think how comfortable management will be experimenting with new ideas when they know they’re up for review again in just a few weeks. In the worst-case scenario, the experiment won’t go well. Management can choose to alter the experiment or kill it altogether, having learned something. In the best-case scenario, you’ll have a brilliant new way of working that earns you billions of dollars a day. Ok, maybe that’s far-fetched, but you will at least have a better way to work, and that kind of rules.

Teach Me How To Retro

Now that I’ve convinced you that having retrospectives should be a no-brainer, let’s talk about how they work. At Gust, we break them into three chunks: The Airing of Grievances, action item definition, and revisiting of past action items.

Much like Festivus, your retro will begin with the Airing of Grievances (and delights). Each team member should be given the chance to explain what troubles they’ve had since the last retrospective and/or what things they think have gone well. To make sure everyone’s voice is heard, we’ve found it best to call on team members individually before opening the floor to everyone. Ideally, someone will be writing these gems down for the whole team to see.

Once your team is satisfied with their list of woes, it’s time to begin the process of solving your problems with action items. Here you go down the list of grievances to come up with solutions. Typically, having a volunteer “own” responsibility for the proposed solution has proven quite fruitful for us.

Unless this is your first retrospective, you should have a list of action items from your last retro. Take a look at these and see if you accomplished your goal or not. If not, they’ll go back up on this week’s list of action items to try again. If done well, feel free to pat yourselves on the back, and maybe have a pizza party to celebrate how rad you are. Hooray!

At Gust, we’ve seen some pretty incredible progress from following this simple process. We’ve seen improvements in things like the beers in our beer fridge all the way to being given 10% time to work on whatever we want (like writing blog posts about retrospectives.) Start having these with your team this week, and let us know how it goes!