In this short reflection wanted to share my thoughts on picking a retrospective framework instead of activities.

Very often, you hear people picking a sailboat retrospective or a tree columns retrospective. And those are simply activities, activities to gather data or generate insights. A retrospective framework is something like the five steps framework by Derby/Larsen, or ORID (objective, reflective, interpretive and decision).

In my opinion, the good thing of picking a framework rather than activities is that you will have a structure for your retrospective meeting. And then you can tailor the activities based on the group situation.

I’m going to use the five step framework, which is the one I’m most familiar with, which has again, five steps. The first one is to set the stage. The second one is to gather data. The third one is to generate insights followed by deciding what to do and closing the retrospective. Now, those five steps are rooted I. They seem, I guess, the first time I heard of them kind of overwhelming. But the opening and closing is something that really should happen in any meeting. Opening sets the purpose. So opening set the stage sets the purpose, checks that the temperature and make sure that everyone is on the same page about the objective about what’s going to happen. So let’s jump the last one which is close, which is basically a stat to make sure is everyone everyone is on the same page about what’s going to happen after the retrospective, there was a critical steps, especially the clothes is is a time that you can gather a quick feedback on the retrospective itself. And again, it’s really critical, in my opinion, to save up 510 minutes, depending on the group size at the end. So opening and closing the two steps. And then in the middle, we have something that resemble the what, what So what now what approach where we look at the data. So data data is step number two in the five steps framework to make sure that everyone is on the same page about what happened, what happened in the last year ratio, what happened about the incident or topic that we’re looking at. So gather data, and then generate insights, which is a critical piece of all this. And jury insights, you could see it as a brainstorming. It’s a step where we kind of go into like, divergent thinking. And we try and come up with different ideas, we try and come up with different options.

In a way, if you if you imagine that you’re trying to, I often use this example, when I’m around workshop about this five steps is imagine that you’re trying to organize a vacation trip with your friends. And so that will be the purpose. So when you set the stage, we’re going to try and organize this trip together. gathering data will be looking back at your last trip. Maybe as individuals look at the data, think about the good and the bad. The things they would do differently. And the way you phrase this is really like dependent on the group. And generate insights is the piece where once everyone is on the same page about the past experience, they come up with new ideas about how would you like this next trip that we’re organizing to be different. So generate insights, this step where we come up with with different ideas with options about this, and this is a good time to also take a break, let your subconscious kick in and give you even even more, more ideas. And then decide what to do a time to kind of like put this, put this, this retrospective this meeting into into action, make something concrete out of it. So try and use SMART objectives specific, measurable, relevant, achievable, time bound, or whatever acronym that kind of makes the action. The decision actionable. And if you don’t have time, now’s a good moment to reflect on Hey, what’s the next step? If we don’t have an action plan, at least a step was the next step to move forward on this initiative. And then like I said, close out the last five minutes.

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