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Ensure your subteam is meeting before the Council meeting where retrospectives are presented.
Note which members on your roster are leaving, and be sure to invite them to participate in the retrospective to record any insights they may have. It is very helpful to document why an activity or initiative is important and worth doing, and not always evident to others after the fact.
Retrospectives are intended to identify what to continue doing, what to stop doing, and what to start doing. This resource provides a number of prompts to help identify these: https://www.parabol.co/resources/retrospective-questions/
Retrospectives are for everyone on your subteam, not just the lead.
Document ideas or possible plans for next term. Even if many people on the subteam are returning next term, you may have forgotten the intention or why the idea felt important.
Document pain points so that they can be addressed next year; if you can identify a potential solution that is even better! (e.g., meetings were hard to facilitate without a notetaker, so next year we will designate one person to take notes all term)
Take some time (individually, as a group) to identify what worked well, and make a plan to keep doing those things. Consider too what didn’t work well, or what doesn’t need to be done anymore (but document why).
Are there completed tasks or projects that will require maintenance by next term’s subteam? Document what needs to happen, how often it needs to happen, who should do it (and tell that person!), what that person needs to know in order to do it, and where that information about how to do it lives.
Do not stress if you didn’t finish tasks, but consider how you can set more achievable goals. Consider smaller goals that can be incremented from term to term.
Remember to distinguish between ongoing tasks (i.e., things that will always be true) and new projects. Assess both.
Leadership has been around awhile, but every subteam has new members. Explore motivations anew, allow for diverse perspectives, and challenge your assumptions.
Examples of prior year’s retrospectives:
TAC:
UAC:
Cross-Council:
Task, Ticket, and Google Drive Ownership
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