Retrospective Meetings
Truly effective teams regularly take the opportunity to pause and reflect on how they’ve been working together. These retrospectives may occur every couple of weeks, every month, or once a quarter.
For your retrospective discussions to be effective, keep everyone’s thinking preferences in mind to keep the team engaged.
Use these tips to plan, lead, and follow up on a retrospective meeting:
Preparing for the meeting
Send out the prompts from the Whole Brain® Retrospective and ask your team members to think about their responses in advance of the meeting.
If you’re using an online tool to facilitate your discussion, have people put their responses (anonymously) in each of the sections.
During the meeting
Allow an additional five minutes for people to identify any additional responses they have.
If there is a large number of responses in the tool you’re using (or on a whiteboard), ask your team to group the ideas into similar categories. This activity gives your team the chance to see everyone else’s ideas and to visually identify themes.
Once you have the responses grouped, ask your team to suggest a title for each group.
Next, ask your team to indicate which topics they would like to discuss more in-depth by voting on the groups.
Start with the category getting the most votes, discuss the responses, and identify if you have any resulting action items. Note those action items in the Actions & Decisions Log.
Follow up after the meeting.
Circulate the Action and Decisions Log to ensure everyone is up to speed on the actions you identified during the retrospective.
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