Retro — notes

Sam McLaren
Digital Dorset
Published in
3 min readApr 16, 2021

As part of my #weeknotechallenge I have decided to challenge myself to doing a different style of weeknotes every week. I am currently on number 12, time flies!

The other 11 are linked below:

‘Traditional’ Weeknotes , Gif-Notes , Sketch-Notes, Shanty-Notes, Week-quotes, Animal Crossing — Notes , Poster — Notes, Haiku — notes, Achievement — notes, Hanami — notes, Meme — notes.

Wrong kind of retro!

This week i am going service design-y and doing a Retrospective. A retrospective is an opportunity to learn and improve. A time to reflect on past events and behaviours. There are lots of different ways of performing retrospectives:

  • Liked, learned, lacked, longed for (4 L’s)
  • The ol’ classic: What went well? What didn’t go well? What can we improve?
  • Stop, start, continue

But i have opted for one that GDS used when we created the Design buddy groups because its a nice way of talking about it…

Basketball!

The principles are the same but this time it is split into:

Dunks, Flukes, Fumbles, and Misses.

Talking about something going well is great but calling it a slam dunk is much more powerful!

I made this Graphic to try and reproduce what a ‘real’ retro would look like but put the bulk text below to make it easier to read:

Dunks

A dunk this week has been all the prep and planning for Creativity week next week. Initially i was concerned that no one in the team seemed interested and everything would fall on my shoulders but the Trio of myself, Claire and Delia have managed to pull together a great week of content!

A real slam-dunk this week was the Team ted talks organised by Pete Bartlett in my team (get medium Pete!). The format is as simple as someone suggesting a Ted Talk to watch and then everyone having a discussion about it. I hosted this week with a Ted Talk i love about iterative design, its become my go-to explanation for Service Design and agile.

Flukes

Leadership has something that has come up a couple of times this week. Leadership often gets combined with manager, but leadership is more about social influence, support, & inspiration, not authority or power. After a recent course i have consciously made an effort to be more aware of leaders in the organisation and to try and become one myself. I hope i am making an impact and will continue to develop.

Fumbles

This week has also been a lot of ‘Balancing plates’ as someone in my team likes to call it. I think i need to get better at sorting time into chunks to focus on one thing instead of trying to balance all of it and jump between.

This is a great ted talk that made me rethink how i focus. In short… more team walks. How to Get Your Brain to Focus | Chris Bailey | TEDxManchester

Misses

One big missed opportunity is not being able to stay for the full digital rural place session yesterday. From what i heard that has been a lot of great conversations about enthusiasm so look forward to seeing where this goes next!

Another miss is the realisation that i should probably take some leave soon, I’m not great at that…

See you next week!

Sam out.

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Sam McLaren
Digital Dorset

Working to promote Dorset as a place to live, work, and visit. DL100 member. Inspiringthefuture volunteer. TED Speaker #SamsBrightIdeas