This article expands on the “retrospective” thread from Management Retrospective.

The background for this topic: work involves a lot of problem retrospectives, incident retrospectives, and the writing of many plans. But on the whole, teammates lean heavily toward doing these things “just to complete the task,” and invest less in self-reflection, exploration, and growth. So I organized this topic around five things:

  1. Making plans, defining goals, and the path to achieving them;
  2. How to track well during execution and get better results;
  3. The core value of retrospective;
  4. How to do a good retrospective and get an improvement plan;
  5. Taking self-growth as the core starting point.

Goals are not for proving who works harder, and a retrospective is not about retelling the results. Their purpose is: to help you make trade-offs before acting, and to update your approach next time after acting.

Prepare Your Own Feelings

First, be clear about where you are stuck in each of planning, goals, and retrospective.

  • What problems do you run into when making plans? Data you can’t check? Goals that are hard to define? Too much business change to align on? Not enough on your plate to plan?
  • What problems do you have when setting goals? Too many uncontrollable factors? No path or logic, and not sure how to set a reasonable goal? Can’t articulate the ceiling and the competitors?
  • What problems do you run into during retrospective? How do you handle interpersonal conflicts? An unclear process? How do you do a retrospective well? What needs to be aligned before a retrospective?
  • The improvement plan after a retrospective: are the people, tasks, and timing clear? Is what needs to be done achievable, one-off or recurring? How do you reach agreement with others?

Points to Discuss

Start steering the orientation from “handing in homework” back to “self-growth” by talking about these points.

  • Planning: at what stage do you actually need to plan? Isn’t this a requirement only at a certain level?
  • Goals: is a goal without data still a goal? How do you write a goal as a lightweight goal that guides choices (result, scope, time window)?
  • Retrospective: for an unsuccessful attempt, how do you reflect without self-justification? First write down what was expected, what actually happened, which evidence supports or overturns the original hypothesis, which conditions you can’t control, and which action to change next time.
  • Improvement plan: where do you get an executable next step rather than a self-justification?
  • Self-growth:
    • This (planning/retrospective) is something the company/leader asked me to do; there’s no growth in it at all.
    • It’s all just handing in homework; I don’t know how to improve myself.
    • I think doing these things doesn’t improve me at all; only a bigger scope can support me.
    • My motivation is low because there’s no positive feedback or incentive.

A retrospective template:

The original hypothesis was that a long guide would reduce repeated questions; in reality, readers only saw the beginning. Next time, first make a one-page entry point and three common paths, then observe whether the same kind of question still comes up.

The output of a retrospective should be one next action. When a goal loses its meaning during a cycle, adjusting or abandoning it is normal — in the conversation you can make clear: why we are changing, what the original effort left behind, and where we are redirecting capacity now.

Complaints and Feedback

  • Can planning and retrospective be more practical? It still feels very abstract.
  • At what stage do you actually need to plan? Isn’t this a requirement only at a certain level?
  • And ＿＿＿＿＿＿