Do you try to make room for more of the work you love?

[Kristen Roth]

Most of us are probably pretty familiar with traditional Retrospectives. But we’ve got another variation for you to try – and we think you’ll really like it! It’ll not only help you make room for doing more of the work you love, but it’ll also help you uncover ways to do less of the work you’re… not so thrilled about.

The 4Ls Retrospective allows us to take a look back at our work during a chosen time period from a factual and an emotional perspective. It asks: What did you love about your work? On the contrary, which parts did you loathe? Were there things you longed for? And, most importantly, what did you learn? Compared to a traditional retro, the difference here might seem subtle, but even the slightest shift in our thinking can open up new insights for us to take action on.

(Here's how to run the Play in Trello! ⬇️) 

Do you and your team dedicate time to run regular retrospectives? And, if so, have you ever tried the 4Ls format? We’d love to hear more about the different techniques and formats you use to reflect back upon your work!  

[Marianne Miller]

I love this idea!  We just had some changes on our team, and this may be just the thing to shift their perspective.  I'm going to try it!  and I love the idea of a shared Trello Board!

[Kristen Roth]

Awesome, @Marianne Miller 🙌  Hope your team enjoys this Play and that you all come away with some great insights! Let us know how it goes! 

[Vero Rivas]

Hi @Kristen Roth 

   Great, In the first chance I can, I will try it, I find it great to use Trello

Cheers

[Kristen Roth]

We hope it goes well for you, @Vero Rivas !

[Sharon Helms]

This is a great one, and will be easy to remember! We have "Lessons Learned" meetings that I think could benefit from this format -- including the Trello board. 

[Kristen Roth]

Oooh. I love the sound of "Lessons Learned" meetings! Are they similar to retrospectives?

[Jimmy Seddon]

This is really great @Kristen Roth!  I've seen similar things in the past, but I really like the language of the 4Ls.  I'm going to recommend this to our managers as something to try during the next retrospectives.

[Kristen Roth]

Great, @Jimmy Seddon ! I hope they enjoy this format! 

[Gregory Oakes]

We deliver digitisation/preservation services for a national cultural institution. As such, a lot of what we do is "factory" work interspersed with some project work. We run our 4L on quarterly basis. We also run Team Health Monitor on a monthly basis and a SWOT analysis at the beginning of our yearly planning cycle. So the SWOT defines how we see ourselves and the 4L captures the "experience" of our teams in their working environment.

We collate the results of the SWOT and the 4L into three groups - the Good Place (Strengths, Loved and Learned), the Bad Place (Weaknesses, Threats, Loathed) and the Opportunity Place (Opportunities and Longed For). We use these as thinking triggers to identify projects and tasks that we can carry out within the team with the idea that we want to make the Good Place as large as possible and the Bad place as small as possible. 

We then use a Trello board to track how we are progressing toward our objectives, which might include things like Maximise our capabilities to deliver services to clients, Develop professional excellence, Engage with influence collegiate organisations, etc. This is basically a dashboard where the team can see the results of their work and the planning in action.

[Kristen Roth]

Wow, @Gregory Oakes Your team process is enviable! I love the idea of breaking out your results from SWOT and 4Ls into those three "Place" groups, and the fact that you have a team Trello board for tracking progress. It's so important to make sure we hold ourselves and our teams accountable for actually making changes after we run these exercises and it sounds like you've got it all down 🙌