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Retrospectives

Setting up a culture of regular and productive reflection on the way you work is one of the best things you can do to facilitate positive innovation and improvement in your agency.

Therefore, it’s important at the end of each project (client or internal) to not simply deliver the result, but also to review how the delivery happened and how it could be improved for next time.

If possible (and, let’s be clear, it is possible), the review should be done regularly during the project too.

If you don’t improve the way you work, you can’t improve the output of your work.

You can only improve the way you work by regularly reviewing it. The process to do that is what’s called a ‘retrospective’.

Creating a healthy culture for retrospectives

For retrospectives to be productive and worthwhile they need to be safe spaces where anything can be discussed openly, while also addressing problems head-on to enable change.

That can be a difficult balance.

It means there are two key parts of the culture that need to be carefully nurtured.

First, your team needs to take responsibility — as a unit of a team rather than as individuals — for the work you have taken on, the way you work, any problems that arise, and the need to continually improve.

And secondly, part of operating in a unit of a team rather than individually, is that you are all jointly and equally responsible. That means that no blame can be laid at the feet of a single individual. You succeed and fail in the unit of a team. Therefore you’re looking at improvements as the whole team. Yes one person may have made a mistake, but others could have peer-reviewed the work, or specified it more clearly, or whatever. There are always multiple aspects to each mistake. So problems are owned by the team.

Thirdly, the two previous parts of the culture will enable an open and frank approach to discussions.

Let’s look at each of these parts of the culture:

Take responsibility

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