50 Shades of Retrospective #36 - Futurespection
Difficulty - Low 🔽
Psychological safety required - Medium
Coming soon to meetups, conferences & a book near you, I'll be sharing some of my top strategies, flim flams, gambits, life hacks, tips & otherwise for how to enable continuous improvement.
Here's one I find teams often forget about. Futurespection.
Retrospectives by their very meaning are focused on the past. They reflect on what's happened during a chosen timeframe, they enable historic events, positive or negative to be considered, with actions then identified to drive future improvement.
We often look backwards when we inspect & adapt, but it can be equally powerful to glance to the future.
𝗔 𝗳𝗲𝘄 𝗼𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂
- Build futurespective thinking into how your team works. Ask a few questions that get your team or organisation thinking about what good looks like in the future.
- Ask them then to work backwards and unpick what actions they'd have to take to achieve that desired state.
- Try the Back to the futurespective or Ghosts of Christmas past, present and future retro templates available here;
Obviously the further into the future you look, the more unknowns there will be. Encourage small steps towards that desired future by narrowing the time frame to the end of the next iteration.
Example futurespection questions;
- What might a newspaper headline say about us in 2 weeks time?
- What successes will we have had if we achieved our iteration goals?
- What's our vision for the next iteration? How did we deliver it?
- What risks / impediments are we going to face next? How did we navigate them?
What methods do you have to enable those you work with to think about the future as well as the past?
Do you have any useful futurespection templates?
Do share folks.