John and I are wrapping up the Hindsight Retros Podcast, with this episode being a retro on our partnership. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who’s been a guest on our podcast, and to all of our listeners. While this may be the final episode, the catalog of episodes will be available online for the foreseeable future; feel free to share with your friends. We hope this project sparked new ideas and perspectives on reflecting on your personal experiences with a blameless retro approach.
Main Takeaways from this Episode
Start with the End In Mind
Discuss and document individual and shared goals of a partnership early on and regularly revisit them to ensure alignment. While goals don’t have to be identical, identifying where they overlap or may be in conflict early can prevent later misunderstandings.
Plan for specific decision points or milestones to reach and agree to discuss the partnership's performance against those milestones. These checkpoints allow for necessary pivots to improve the partnership or signal a need to exit gracefully before becoming trapped in the sunk cost fallacy.
Communication
Effective communication is essential for a successful partnership, requiring ongoing effort and openness. Rather than relying solely on goodwill, develop habits to make sure disagreements get surfaced before they fester. For example, make it a habit of asking for difficult feedback periodically, or agree to use a well documented model like Radical Candor or Crucial Conversations.
Listen to your feelings; even if things seem on the surface to be going OK, your intuition may be giving you important signals about issues that need to be surfaced. A useful metaphor from lean manufacturing is the Andon which gives anyone on the team the license to pull a cord to stop production to address an issue.
Personal Styles
We all collaborate and communicate differently, and that can lead to challenges or misunderstandings. Although personality frameworks such as True Colors, Myers Briggs, or Enneagram have limitations, they can provide a shared framework for fostering mutual understanding and improving teamwork. Talk through preferences and styles early on and create a shared understanding of how you can work best together with others that have different styles.
The Hindsight Retros Blameless Approach to Retrospectives
The four questions to ask in any retrospective:
What Worked?
What Didn’t Work?
Where did we get Lucky?
What will we do differently next time?
As you answer these 4 questions adopt these mindsets:
Blameless attitude: avoid blaming yourself or others for what went poorly as this will create an environment of fear and will close our minds to learning
Systemic Perspective: consider all contributing factors to the situation when examining what went well or not well. This includes the role of luck or happenstance both positively and negatively
Forward Looking: use the exercise to look ahead for how the learning applies to future experiences and goals
Growth Mindset: open your mind to growth and change to maximize lasting improvements to your life
Pattern Matching: look beyond a single experience and seek patterns in your life that can lead to deeper change for you and your relationships
Links to resources from the episode
On collaboration
On our passions
Contact
Follow Sue Lueder on LinkedIn
Email Sue Lueder
Email John Reese
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