Retrospectives … Postmortems … After Action Reviews …
Whatever you call them, there’s value in deliberately allocating time to look back on the recent past to learn lessons to improve the future.
But even the most valuable discipline can become meaningless if it reverts to a routine performed merely to satisfy an external process. If you hold the same retrospective every two weeks just because your Scrum handbook tells you to, you may quietly reach the point where the ritual does more harm than good.
Here are some patterns that can derail a postmortem if you’re not careful.
🔵 Reporting problems as symptoms that happened without tracing them back to the actions and choices that caused them.
🔵 Focusing on the felt impact of events beyond the team’s control rather than on how the team responded to those events.
🔵 Saving all feedback for delivery during the retrospective when more immediate personal conversations might have been more productive and appropriate.
🔵 Concentrating on either praise or complaints instead of giving honest attention to both reinforcing and corrective feedback. This imbalance can happen at either a team level or in targeting individual members of the team.
🔵 Identifying something to do differently, with either no intention or no capacity to actually do it differently.
To get real ongoing value from your after action reviews include some positive findings to reinforce and celebrate past progress. And where you identify opportunities to improve, actively acknowledge what is and isn’t within your control, and commit to a small number of concrete, addressable issues that you will address. Then make the improvement visible so it can be celebrated next time.
And if you’d like to explore your team’s track record of improvement together, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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