And when you’re planning a retrospective for a project, an initiative, an event, or a campaign, it can be helpful to use the same format each time, so that people understand what to expect and feel safe sharing it. I’m a big fan of Miro — they create collaborative software for teams. Their blog focuses on great strategies to create more shared decision making and collaboration among teams. Their article on retrospectives is a fantastic read with great retro frameworks. Here are five that I think would work well for our team (and so many others!)

Top Retrospective Frameworks

• Start, Stop, Continue: A straightforward method asking what actions to begin, cease, or maintain.

• 4 Ls (Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For): Promotes nuance by exploring what team members enjoyed, discovered, missed, or desired.

• Sailboat (Speedboat): Uses a metaphor to identify what propelled the team (wind), what slowed them down (anchors), and risks ahead (rocks/pirates).

• Glad, Sad, Mad: Encourages emotional reflection by categorized feedback into what made the team happy, disappointed, or frustrated.

• ORID (Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, Decisional): A structured approach for facilitators to guide the team from facts to decisions.

I love this book.

Right now while we’re a small company, the idea of a 360 review doesn’t make a lot of sense. Instead, we adopted and adapted a fantastic exercise from Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by the extraordinary Claire Hughes Johnson.

Find the exercise starting on page 5 of the Scaling People workbook, here. But also, read this whole book, and keep it on your desk — you’ll need it often.

Books:

• Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson: This is one of the best leadership books I’ve ever read, and it’s a reference guide on my shelf.

• Bury My Heart at Conference Room B by Stan Slap:

Talks & Sites:

• Learning Omnivores: How the Values Exercise is used with school principals

• Stan Slap talks at Google (17:25 is where he talks about this type of values exercise):