Welcome to our Substack community of life hackers and blameless retro storytellers! In these regular newsletters we’ll share podcast launches, news, and helpful pointers to help you get started doing blameless retros on your own experiences.
We were thrilled to finally announce our podcast project to our Facebook and LinkedIn friends and followers last Friday. When will our eagle fully land? Only time will tell, but we’re excited to see the interest from so many folks on applying blameless retros in “real life”, and we look forward to sharing many more stories and tips via this newsletter.
Our Next Podcast Episode: The Polish Mishap
In our next podcast episode John Reese will interview his brother Dan about a travel adventure in Germany and Poland from their younger years that went a bit sideways. It’s a lot of fun to hear them share their own sometimes misaligned recollections of the same incident and to see how the retro storytelling brings two brothers even closer together than they were before.
How did John acquire his lifelong love of luxurious bathrobes and room service? You’ll have to tune into the podcast to find out! Episode comes out September 20.
Atomic Habits: A tool to get in the right mindset
It’s not always easy to pick up a new habit, such as running blameless retros (or learning how to draw comics). How many of us have set the best intentions to pick up a new habit in a new year, only to fall back into our old patterns again and again? One my favorite life hacking books is about breaking out of that pattern: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (by James Clear)
The quick takeaways that resonate most with me are these:
Break it down: Sometimes a change is just too big to bite off. Clear advocates to take any change you seek and break it down into the smallest possible chunk that you know you can do. An example he shares is about a regular flossing habit. For him, he started by just flossing one tooth, and adding one each day.
Stack it: Smaller habits stack and build on top of each other and lead to more profound change. So, if you have a big behavior to change, consider taking that habit breakdown, and then stacking them together for the larger change.
Build Systems: Focus on building the right systems over ambitious goals, trust the process and system, and the rest will follow. For example, setup environments that enable better choices and that discourage bad habits, such as putting the candy jar out of reach so you need a stepladder to get to it.
So maybe we’ve inspired you to start a habit of doing blameless retrospectives after major life experiences, but you aren’t sure how to start. Atomic Habits can help by introducing smaller versions of the practices. Let’s imagine you want to institute a new family habit of blameless retrospecting on major home projects as a family, like spring cleaning, gardening, or decluttering and taking donation items to the charity shop. Let’s look at those 4 retro questions again:
1. What Went Well?
2. What Went Poorly?
3. What Was Lucky?
4. What will we change next time?
How might Atomic Habits help get the family used to asking these questions in a blameless way?
Break it Down: Maybe it’s too much to cover all 4 questions in one sitting. So maybe instead you cover one question at a time at a family meal or on a family drive to the store. Or maybe, you divvy up the questions to the different family members, and then as a group you walk through the answers. Stay tuned to our newsletters where we will share a related approach called the Six Thinking Hats Technique.
Stack it: Take those smaller pieces and over time start stacking them. Maybe you start by just having a conversation that covers the questions, then eventually you start writing things on a whiteboard or sticky notes, and eventually you start capturing retros in a document that you can search.
Build Systems: Something central like a shared Google doc, or maybe something physical like a whiteboard or sticky notes could be your system. The family can decorate a colorful suggestion box and drop in sticky notes for later review. When someone has an answer to one of the questions they can simply write it down in the moment and drop it in the box. Once a month you can open the box and harvest the things you want to change next time.
Get creative, keep it fun, and the habit can become sticky (pardon the pun).
What we’re listening to lately
Dr. Andrew Huberman Ph.D. is a neuroscientist and tenured professor at Stanford School of medicine and hosts a wildly popular podcast called the Huberman Lab. I wanted to use this newsletter to signal boost one of his latest episodes on the neuroscience behind the Growth Mindset. Dr. Huberman interviews one of his Stanford colleagues Dr. Jamil Zaki Ph.D. a professor of psychology and author of a new book Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.
What I really liked about this episode was the exploration of Cynicism vs Skepticism, and how although some consider these two mindsets strongly related, upon closer examination, they are really very different. Dr. Zaki explains how Cynicism reflects a fixed mindset, and how cynics will seek data that validates existing (often negative) views of the world and of others. Skepticism is instead a seeking of new information, he describes it as a “restlessness with our assumptions…a desire for new information.”
Skepticism is a philosophical worldview that we can really never know anything. Skeptics associate closely with scientists and the scientific method, seeking new information to validate or disprove a given hypothesis. Dr. Huberman goes on to connect this outlook to an embrace of complexity, which is really how the world, and especially how the world of human interactions and society behaves. However, we should not use complexity as a reason to be cynical as protection, but rather we can take the stance of a skeptic and seek information and challenge our own beliefs.
This episode goes pretty deep and a bit nerdy about “Wicked learning environments” where our priors prevent us from accepting new information and updating our views vs “Bayesian learning environments” where new data comes in and helps us learn and update our world views. The two doctors applied this to interpersonal relationships and trust in others in a way that was novel and helped me see the Growth Mindset in a new light.
Connecting this to the blameless retrospective practice, we could use a retrospective format to ask ourselves a few questions:
Did I approach this experience as a cynic? Was I expecting the worst and did I feel validated when my fears materialized? Or did I approach this as a skeptic, with hypotheses that I sought data to confirm or refute?
Did I put my trust in others? Or did I hold back my trust and miss out on valuable data that could update my worldview or beliefs?
If you find this interesting, I recommend listening to the full 2+ hour episode and subscribing to his podcast. Lots of golden nuggets on not just neuroscience, but many other life improvement subjects, such as exercise, skin care, emotional intelligence, the list goes on.
Feedback and Contact Info
One of our podcast launch goals is to gather feedback from our listeners. If you have anything to share, both positive and constructive, drop us a line at feedback@hindsightretros.com. And if you want to be a guest on a future podcast to tell your own story, let us know!
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