Hello again!
I’ve been on vacation for a couple weeks – I went to London to catch up with friends, and in the middle, I hopped over to Scotland for some whisky tourism. In the process, I almost repeated a past mistake: I woke up on the day I was going to fly to Scotland and realized I didn’t have my passport.
There will be a full retro for the trip covering this and other incidents in detail, but in short: I travel with a rolling bag and a backpack. When I arrived in London, I took my passport out and put it in my rolling bag, so it wouldn’t get beat up traveling around town with me. I thought to myself: I’ll just set a reminder so I don’t forget to take the passport out before I drop off the bag with my friend, because my plan was to do the Scotland sub-trip with only my backpack.
I then ended up spending several long nights hanging out with friends, and on the night before my Scotland trip, I took my rolling bag to my friend’s house, and drank and shared vacation photos and videos until 4 in the morning.
That next morning, I woke up with the sun in my hotel room… which was lucky, because I had not set an alarm despite having a morning flight! And I immediately realized I had never made good on my plan to set that reminder to take my passport out of the rolling bag. My passport was still at my friend’s house.
I texted my friend, booked a two-step taxi across town (very hungover and nauseous) to my friend’s house and then to the airport, and everything worked out in the end, but… more opportunities to learn.
Learning from travel is going to be the theme of the week.
Our Next Podcast Episode: Kumano Kodo Trail
In our next podcast episode Sue and John talk to their friend Caro (short for Carolina) about a several day long hike along a pilgrimage trail in Japan, and what you learn about your friends when you’re all tired and stressed and out of your comfort zone. Listen, and learn what it means to stay out of the red!
An interesting concept for retrospectives: the OODA loop
Often during retrospectives, we think about how we react to situations: did our rational brain react, or was it our subconscious or reptile brain? Did we have the right information to make the right decisions? What could we have done to make better decisions faster?
The OODA Loop is a concept I’ve found useful for thinking about how living beings – and some kinds of software – operate in the world. It originally came out of the military, but is broadly applicable. The idea is we observe the world, then orient based on those observations plus our own background and knowledge (and sometimes prejudices), make a decision, and then act on it. Our life consists of repeating this pattern forever.
One benefit of thinking about it this way is that it lets you think about what parts you can control. Do you want to make better decisions faster, e.g. when you wake up hungover before your flight to Scotland? Maybe you can tighten that OODA Loop by setting reminders in your phone so the right observations come in at the right moment to orient you to decide to take the right action, e.g. putting your passport in your pocket, at the right time.
Another application might be: I caught my reptile brain executing its OODA Loop, maybe I can interrupt it and have my rational brain reexamine those observations, orient against its rational background, and decide rationally what to do.
What we’re up to lately
In addition to Hindsight Retros, I’ve been working on a wild overgrown novel. I started in 2002 and recently finished the first draft.
On the flight back from the UK, I was working on something called a “reverse outline” for the novel. There are two basic strategies to write a novel: by the seat of your pants (“pantsing”), or by taking a well-defined story structure (e.g. The Hero’s Journey or Three Act Structure) and writing an outline that states how your story is going to hit each beat in the structure.
My novel was extremely pantsed. But you can take a pantsed novel and retroactively write an outline for it, discovering the structure it had, and giving you insight as to how to make it flow better and be more satisfying.
So, on the flight, I looked over my 1290-page novel, figured out where to break it into three logically coherent volumes, and looked at each of the three volumes. The first has four intertwined but independent stories; the second is three novellas showing the same character over a period of many years; the third is a single story that wraps up all those threads. And the trilogy itself needs to hang together as a story. All together, I decided I needed to write nine reverse outlines (more if you count the character arcs), and I got through about four of them on the flight.
What does this have to do with retrospectives? Something about going back over something that’s already happened, with respect, and seeing how it unknowingly followed a good pattern, while identifying ways to make it better, feels like it rhymes with the retrospective process.
Contact and Feedbacks
One of our podcast launch goals is to gather feedback from our listeners. If you have anything to share, both positive and constructive, please drop us a line at feedback@hindsightretros.com. And if you want to be a guest on a podcast to tell your own story, let us know!
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