Assemble’s End-of-Year Reflection — and a Few Tips for Running Your Own

A few weeks ago, we published an article on how to run end-of-year reflections for small teams. The feedback we received from the post was encouraging — several people reached out to let us know they are using our process within their organizations, and a few hired us to come facilitate it for them.

We believe whatever we do for our clients we should also do for ourselves — so two weeks ago we ran through the exercise with our own team. Here’s a summary of how it went and what we learned.

Our Success & Failure Stories

Our approach to end-of-year reviews follows four acts. In “Act 1: Observation”, we captured stories from the group about major successes and setbacks we faced over the year. Each story is represented by a sticky note on the whiteboard, mapped over time and across a y-axis that represents how positive or negative the event was. Here are a few of our story “movie titles”:

I Can’t Tell What You Do — A failure to clearly articulate our work, which led to a lost client and lost opportunities for others to help us.

Go Where The Water Flows — A success where we followed our feet toward communication workshops for young professionals.

We Must Be Missing Something — A failure in the sales process that led to our third big lost client proposal in a row.

What Helped Us Succeed

After connecting those stories to our 2017 goals, we then sat back and asked ourselves: What helped us reach our goals?

We then parsed out the common behaviors, key relationships, and assumptions that contributed to our successes:

Behaviors: Creating and following through on a process, staying top of mind with clients and friends, rapidly prototyping potential offerings and sales strategies.

Key Relationships: True believers like Zoe Schlag, Steve Wanta, Chris Covo, and Pamela Soin. Early customers like Boris Pilev. Many more.

Assumptions: “Team development is personal and professional development wrapped up in one”, “ People want to say yes”, “Play more”.

Our New Reality

Then, we asked ourselves: What has changed? What new problems and opportunities did this year create? We captured answers to these questions into five categories: Insights, Assets, Partners, Risks, and Choices.

This was one of the most exciting parts of the experience for us — getting to see how drastically things have changed since December 2016.

Insights: What do we know now that we didn’t?
People need to see our work. Long sales cycles normally die. Relationships matter.

Assets: What do we have now that we didn’t?
Greater mastery in facilitating teams. A sales pipeline. Case studies

Partners: Who’s a part of our mission that wasn’t?
Kara Solis (Our wonderful intern!). Brian, Daniel, Pam, Tobin (advisory board members).

Risks: What have we lost and what can we still afford to lose?
Need to get faster at filtering unqualified clients. Need to stay focused on work that sells.

Choices: What do we have agency over?
To sell products or sell ourselves as the product. To target smaller or larger engagements.

Lessons Learned, Lessons We Want to Learn, and Capturing Next Steps

The final part of the exercise involves synthesizing everything into clear lessons learned, questions to pursue, and action items moving forward. Here are ours:

Lessons Learned

- The magic sales question is: “What would be awesome?”
- Pursuing partnerships with others can be valuable but it’s also risky in terms of sunk time.
- Smaller engagements move faster.
- Referrals and relationships are everything.

Lessons We Want to Learn

- How do we move more outside of our current network?
- What would enable us to take more pride in our work?
- How big can our firm be?

Keep, Start, Stop, Restart

- Keep connecting with our network, holding regular meetings, publishing, and hosting public events.
- Start a more visual way of tracking our work, holding each other accountable, and testing cold pitches.
- Stop saying yes to every potential direction.
- Restart improv — this keeps us nimble!

Tips for Running Your Own End-of-Year Reflection

1. Prep your team for the task. It’s a lot of mental work. Reflection is rewarding, but it can also be mentally and physically tiring.
2. Leave some space. A few things came up during the process that warranted deeper discussion than we initially planned. Because we created extra time to explore additional questions, we had space to chase a few worthy rabbit trails.
3. Separate out your storylines. This is a technical note. After we mapped out moments of success and failure from 2016 on our timeline and connected them to our yearly goals, we found it helpful to create separate storylines for each goal on a different whiteboard or table. This made it easier to see how each event on our timeline connected to goals we met or missed.
4. Stay flexible. So much of the value in this work is about getting everyone in the same room, communicating appreciation for one another, and giving each person the space to process the work. Don’t be afraid if your conversation ends up looking differently than you thought it would — the team is still experiencing something transformative.

See the original article —which has everything you need to run a reflection exercise with your team — here: How to Run an End-of-Year Reflection for Your Organization

Interested in having us facilitate? Email us at hello@howweassemble.com