Retrospectives

Today I've begun an experiment in self-improvement inspired by an agile development practice called a "retrospective" which we use at my team at Amazon. In SCRUM for example, a software development team holds retrospectives every two or so weeks, which are 1-2 hour discussions of what went well, what is going badly, and action items for the next two weeks. It's not a complicated idea, but the goal is iterative, rapid self-improvement, learning from mistakes, while reviewing previous retrospectives to ensure that lessons are actually learned and improvements are actually made.

I've decided to supplement the process with geometrically-increasing (by a factor of 8) goal intervals of 2 weeks, 16 weeks (~4 months), 128 weeks (~2.5 years), and 1,024 weeks (~19.5 years). The idea is that at each retrospective, in addition to identifying what went well and poorly over the last two weeks, you also outline an optimistic vision for what your life might look like after each of the periods, in a way that helps to continuously connect short-term actions with long-term objectives. 8x seemed like the right ratio here; optionally, you can add a 8,192-week (157-year) interval if you're feeling healthy.

More concretely:

- At every retrospective you would make a 2-week vision, and action items for the next two weeks.

- Every two retrospectives (i.e. every four weeks) you would create a 16-week vision.

- Every 16 retrospectives (every 32 weeks, or approx. 8 months) entails the creation of a new 128-week vision.

- Every 128 retrospectives (every 256 weeks, or approx. 5 years) a new 1,024-week (~19.5-year) vision is made.

And at every retrospective, review the the notes/visions/action items from the previous retrospectives with a 4x geometric increase, so: 2 weeks ago, 8 weeks ago, 32 weeks ago, 128 weeks ago, and 512 weeks ago. This is done in order to provide a spaced repetition reminder of past lessons, as well as to understand how closely events have lined up with intentions. The idea here is not to be tied to any past goals, but rather to remember past goals, for whatever they're worth, and see them side-by-side with recent experience.

The whole process should take one to two hours. It is also not meant to be quite as rigid as it might sound from the description. It's a tool, not an end to itself.