Prime Directive for Futurespectives
As the term “retrospective” implies, typically the focus for a retrospective is on shared experiences that a team has had during a specific (and most often very recent) period of time.
There are situations where it can be helpful to orient the conversation more toward the future than back upon the past. Thus visioning and planning activities come to mind as examples of situations where forward-thinking is the normal mode of operations. There are also situations where teams may benefit from focusing their retrospective conversation at least partially on the future, and in this context, the term “future” can be extended beyond the classic set of action items that teams seek to focus on during their next iteration — to any time horizon the team chooses to focus on, whether it is the next quarter or the next year.
The notion of a futurespective is not new. The Fun Retrospectives website has a nice collection of futurespective techniques. The site also includes a prime directive for what it calls “futurospectives,” attributed to Paulo Caroli and TC Caetano:
Hope and confidence come from proper involvement and a willingness to predict the unpredictable. We will fully engage on this opportunity to unite around an inclusive vision, and join hands in constructing a shared future.
Here is a modified version that I have written (which you can also find on this public Trello board, containing a collection of retrospective techniques):
Confidence comes from full team involvement and a willingness to do what we can to foresee our future together, while also accepting that things will happen that we did not anticipate. We will fully engage in this opportunity to unite around an inclusive vision, and work together to set a path forward that helps us fulfill our goals and have fun while doing it.
It seems to me that stating a prime directive such as the one above could be a nice way to frame many types of visioning and planning conversations, not to mention forward-facing conversations in a retrospective context.
