Retrospective meetings are an effective way of encouraging continuous development within your organization. Usually held after a project, event, sprint, or campaign, retrospective meetings invite a diverse range of perspectives to a structured forum to analyze what went well, not so well, and areas for improvement.
What is a retrospective meeting?
Popular in agile methodology, retrospective meetings are used to gather feedback after either an event, project (phase), or sprint. Often used by scrum masters, project managers, or other agile teams, there are three clear aims to a retrospective meeting, namely to determine:
- What went well
- What didn’t go well, or where there were issues
- Areas for improvement for the next project
For a retrospective meeting to be successful, a variety of team members (ideally across different departments or seniority levels) should attend. This ensures you receive a range of perspectives on the project - what was a success for one department member may have been a failure for another. Hearing from a range of viewpoints enables you to get a holistic understanding of the project, as well as encouraging cross-functional collaboration.
There is no right or wrong way to hold a retrospective meeting. The primary objective of a retrospective meeting is to encourage participation among attendees to get a broad range of responses that you can incorporate into improvement activities. Generally retrospective meetings work best when highly structured in nature as this leads to focused reflections by attendees. You might find that your meeting invites some (healthy) debate - just make sure all communication is respectful and all team members are heard. If required, assign a moderator role before, or at the start of, the meeting.
Retrospective meetings integrate well with other internal methodologies. For example, if you’ve adopted OODA in your organisation - another agile approach - a retrospective meeting would take place in the ‘observe’ stage. 
For example, you’ve previously remarked that your production volume isn’t keeping up with demand so you trial a new process to increase output. Following the trial, production numbers either remained stagnant or decreased. Holding a retrospective meeting, following a structured agenda, to analyze this trial will help you in the future with updating your production processes.
Why hold a retrospective meeting
Retrospective meetings are a relatively simple way of introducing a collaborative culture within your organization. They should be held regularly to ensure you’re continually striving to streamline, or enhance, your internal processes. Frequent assessment of your activities will lead to higher quality results and reduced blockers (or bottlenecks) for future projects.
Taking time to critically analyze your projects prevents future mistakes and helps team members with learning and development. This will also support planning for future projects as you will have better awareness of strengths and weaknesses, or potential problems. Ultimately, you are continuously improving to ensure you deliver your organization’s desired outcomes.
Retrospective meetings form a large part of strategy creation. As you involve team members from varying levels and disciplines, you create a sense of shared ownership for successes and failures - plus you’ll benefit from buy-in across the organization. From these meetings, senior leadership gain comprehensive insight into how the overall strategy (and its planned activities) is performing. You additionally create a safe space for team members to share feedback. By encouraging open and honest communication, you will improve individual relationships across disciplines and levels of seniority - potentially increasing employee motivation, too.
Example agenda of a retrospective meeting
To reiterate, there is no right or wrong way to hold a retrospective meeting. It might take a few attempts to find the format that works best for you and your team. No matter the specific agenda of the meeting, it should be based on the ‘start, stop, continue’ ideology.
Firstly, set the scene. Lay down some housekeeping rules for the meeting such as what you want participation to look like. This manages attendees’ expectations for the meeting. Once this has been agreed, provide a summary of the project or activity you’ll be discussing in the meeting.
Now is your opportunity to gather feedback. Take time to reflect on what really happened from each perspective. Ensure that each attendee gets time to voice their opinion on the project. Feedback should be structured and focus on parts of the project that went well, parts that didn’t go well or not as planned, learnings (if any), and areas for improvement.
After you’ve gathered feedback, it’s time to analyze. Are there clear contributing factors for what went well and didn’t? Can you capitalize on, or minimize, these for the future? Create a clear list of actions including changes and improvements to consider for your next project.
Remember, the principal goal of a retrospective meeting is to collate as many viewpoints as possible in a structured forum. The more varied your insights are, the more you will see more significant process improvements long term. Inviting diverse perspectives to the meeting entails collaborative strategy creation, which increases buy-in (and internal support) across departments. This also encourages collaboration across different teams which will have a positive impact on business as usual activities.
Conclusion
Retrospective meetings are simple in their nature but a highly effective tool to integrate into your organization to promote cross-functional collaboration. They allow you to review your internal processes, identify core strengths and weaknesses, and encourage problem-solving skills amongst team members. Making retrospective meetings an integral part of your organization’s continuous improvement reduces inefficiencies or issues and supports you in delivering high quality results.
