Creating Your Own Personal Retrospective
As a Scrum Master, my job is to help teams within companies improve their performance over time. One way I do this is through something called a sprint retrospective. At the end of every sprint — a period of time during which specified work must be completed — a team will look back and evaluate its performance, identifying what it did well and what can be improved.
The sprint retrospective is a powerful process that allows team members to make sense of their most recent experiences. They can celebrate wins, acknowledge setbacks, recognize patterns, and create plans based on the insights.
At some point, after leading enough teams through enough of these exercises, I began to wonder: Why aren’t we doing this in our personal lives? I’m a Scrum Master, but I’m also a dad, husband, writer, friend, and family member, and I want to keep getting better in all of these roles.
So I’ve started leading my own weekly retrospectives, following one of my favorite formats, “Three Ls.” The Ls stand for Liked, Learned, and Lacked. All you have to do is ask yourself three questions:
- What did I like?
- What did I learn?
- And what was lacking?
Here’s how it works….
Getting started
On a sheet of paper or in a notebook, draw four columns. In the left column, list either the various roles you play, like “manager” and “parent,” or the areas of your life that you wish to work on, like “organization” or “unplugging.” When I do this, I usually focus on my roles, but I also include “healthy,” since taking care of my body and mind is one of my biggest priorities.
In the remaining three columns, write liked, learned, and lacked. This is where the real work happens.
Picture of the 3L’s template in my notebook
Inspect
Retrospectives provide an opportunity for the process that scrum masters call “inspection and adaptation.” So first, inspect how you’re doing by filling in the three Ls.
Liked: What were your wins of the week? Note your successes, big or small.
Learned: What were your discoveries? Here, you can start to notice patterns.
Lacked: What did not go well? This is where you clarify your disappointments and frustrations. In writing them out, you often uncover your subconscious expectations. (For instance, you might realize that you thought you’d get 10 pages of your book done on the same day that construction workers were tearing up your bathroom.) You begin to see how you might be setting yourself up for failure.
Fill out the sheet in any order that makes sense to you. For me, pinpointing what I learned is the hardest column, so I start there.
Some notes from one of my recent retrospectives:
- Now that both of my kids are grown and have moved out, I see them less, which I don’t love. However, I like that we stay in touch through social media, which lets us keep interacting in a fun way. I want to keep that a priority.
- I learned that weekends are tough for losing weight. I enjoy wine and tapas. I should take it easy — I can still have my favorite foods, but I will eat smaller portions more slowly, savoring every bite.
- Last week, I spent hardly any time writing my book. Since I want to get it ready for review in a few months, I need to structure my days differently. I’m going to switch from a motorbike to a train so I can write during my commute.
Adapt
Based on what I’ve written, I adapt by choosing one to three concrete actions to pursue in the coming week and adding them to my personal to-do list. If I do them well, I should see the impact of these improvements in my next week’s retrospective.
The Three Ls format is elegantly simple. If you want to try something else, there are plenty of other retrospective formats available. Just experiment and find out what works for you. Once you’ve been doing them for a while, you can go back to your early retrospectives and see just how far you’ve come.