Retrospective
A short, honest look back at a piece of work — what we did well, what we can do better, and what follows, each with an owner.
The retrospective is the instrument that turns experience into learning, and without it experience merely accumulates. Its whole content is the gap: what we said would happen, what happened, and the difference. That difference is the only genuinely new information a week produces, and a body that does not collect it is running blind while feeling busy.
Four properties make one work. It is short — a look-back that takes an afternoon will not be held weekly, and a weekly one is worth more than a thorough annual one. It is honest, which requires a Zero Blame Environment: cause is sought in the set-up, not in the person, because the moment a retrospective can produce blame it starts producing accounts designed to avoid it. It ends in actions with owners, or it is a conversation about feelings; and each action closes only when its fix sits where the work will meet it — a lesson filed where nobody will trip over it has not been learned. And it is attended by the people who did the work, because they are the only ones who know what actually happened.
It is the simplest form of continuous learning and improvement, and it is close to the only genuinely mandatory element: plan, act, learn, improve. In the Game it lives inside The Turn — each person says what they said they would do, whether they did it, the gap, and what they learned — and at each turning it widens into OmniSpection, which looks inward, outward, backward, and forward, and is done in community, because retrospection alone is not enough.
Two disciplines keep it from drifting. Review is not self-evaluation — the honest look-back is written by someone other than the one being looked at wherever that is possible. And Every Defect Is A Gift: a retrospective that surfaces nothing is not a sign of a good week.
Also called: Retrospectives · Retrospection · look-back Stands on: Learning · Praxis · Zero Blame Environment · The Record Opens onto: Continuous Improvement · Every Defect Is A Gift · OmniSpection · The Turn · The gap · Attend, Plan, Act, Learn, Improve Cycle · Second reader In play: table · Home Sources: Continuous Improvement (wiki root; draft — "the most basic form of continuous learning and improvement is the regular practice of Retrospectives") · The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language — Synthesized, Continuous Learning (canon-grade) · Player+ Modules Lexicon — retrospective, look-back (draft — written by anyone except the one being looked at) · The DNA of Heaven, Part V (Fable synthesis — the Turn, the season's OmniSpection) · lionsberg.wiki: Retrospectives Open: none found.