How to run an effective retrospective for your relationship?

Published in

HabitClub

6 min readJun 1, 2021

Applying Agility in my dating life

For people who know me, you probably know as an agile evangelist and productivity geek, I apply agility to every single aspect in my life, that include my dating life of course…

I am convinced my partner initially found me and know I am the one were because I put “Agile and productivity optimisation” under hobby in my dating profile.

But anyway, apart from all the moving motivator from management 3.0 to understand our key motivators, a visual kanban board to organise our household chores, one of our favourite and most effective activity (in MHO) is — Regular Relationship Retrospective (RRR).

However, as an experienced facilitator, I found it extremely difficult one to facilitate. Not only because I won’t be able to fully taken on the impartial facilitator role due to conflict of interests, but also all the retrospective techniques are being designed for professional context and can kill the mood a bit if we just apply it directly…

Just for records, we have experimented most of the common retrospective tools, such as:

You can find a lot of good retrospective exercise from Tastycupcake and Funretrospective

They all worked — each time we did came out with some honest discussion and solid improvement actions to take on board, but we both feel a bit uncomfortable with each other due to mismatch context of professional and personal life.

So, I created a New Retrospective Method…

During our recent 3 years’ anniversary trip, I created and experimented on this new retrospective format and it is probably the most effective one we have done so far. I called it “3:1 Method”.

I hope some of you can apply this method in your relationship or even with your team. As I haven’t done this with my team yet, I would love to hear from you if you do decide to try.

I am writing up some of the potential modification I would make for applying in professional context.

Preparation:

Pen and Paper
Glass of your favourite beverage (* optional but very helpful)
Ideally a nice camp fire (* optional but very helpful)

Here are the 10 questions I put together for the

( you don’t have to answer them all, see the instruction below)

1. Please share top 3 best memories in the past 3 months ( referred back to old messages and photos are encouraged)
2. What makes them great?
3. What are 1 moment/situation that you feel it’s imperfect/ wish to turn out differently
4. What are the 3 things about me you absolutely love?
5. What is the 1 thing about me you wish I can improve?
6. List out 3 ideas to help improve our relationship
7. Let’s commit to 1 action from today to help improve our relationship
8. What are the 3 common goals we want to achieve as couple?
9. What is our next relationship goal?
10. Say “I love you + the answers from Question 4” to each other sincerely

Modification for teams:

1. Please share top 3 best team memories in last sprint ( refer back to team metrics, JIRA board are encouraged)
2. What makes them great?
3. What are 1 team moment/situation that you feel it’s imperfect/ wish to turn out differently ?
4. What are the 3 things about this team you absolutely love?
5. What is the 1 thing about this team you wish to improve?
6. List out 3 ideas to help improve our team’s _____( you can make it really specific base on the theme for the retro, for example: our team’s process, our team’s culture, our team’s thought-put etc)
7. Let’s commit to 1 action from today to help improve our team’s ___ (same as above)
8. What are the top 3 goals we want to achieve as a team? (If this has covered in other ceremonies feel free to skip it)
9. What is our goal for next sprint? (same as above)
10. Say — We are a great team and thank you to each team member

Estimate time

1- 2 hours (it varies depends on the atmosphere)

Agenda

Check-in : Agree on social contract for this retro

Tips: We found this step really helpful, as the rules we initially agree on provide a good guidelines and emotion safety nets for running the retrospective.

We only have 4 principles:

Relationship first
Stay chill
Respect each other’s opinions
Look after each other’s feeling

2. Agree on the Questions and Agenda

Tips: 10 questions can be a bit overwhelming for some people (I can see that from Patrick’s face that he was overwhelmed…) So we discussed and collaboratively decided our top 5 favourite questions to start with. We agreed to leave the hard ones for the next retrospective. We found this step really important to increase the involvement and focus for the whole activity.

3. Start the retrospective

Tips: Please allow enough individual silent thinking time, encourage to write the thoughts down. Some of the questions might be difficult to start, it’s encouraged to go through old messages and photos (if you use with the team, I guess you can do go through the JIRA board and metrics).

4. Closing Activity- Appreciate each other for taking time to do this exercise together! :)

Tips: We are doing this to help deepen our bond and improve our relationship, so this step is very important.

Why this method works better for us?

I really believe this retrospective works better for us because we don’t have that awkward moment during and after like before.

Here are the key reasons why I think it works better:

The idea of 3:1 is we spend 3 times of efforts to reflect and celebrate the positive moments and achievements in this relationship and about each other.
This is a mix of Retrospective and Futurespective, while we reflect the past , we also spending equal and even more time to plan out the future. This really help us to move forward with And with the focus of 1 commitment, it increases
The importance of Check-ins and Closing activities: This is something we always skip or do it rushly in professional context. But from this experience reenforce the importance of the check-ins and closing steps in the retrospective. They really remind us why we are doing this exercise and provide a safety net for our discussion.

Anyway, let me know what do you think about this retrospective method and if you ever tried it for your personal or professional life. Feedback is always welcome here:)