Dynamic Reteaming, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14. Reflect and Determine How to Shift

Reflecting on how things have gone in the past to derive the ways we want to change going forward is at the heart of being a learning organization. This can happen at multiple levels: across many teams, within teams, and through one-on-one sessions. When we encourage the people in our organization to own their own growth and development through experimentation and learning, they are on the road to becoming empowered.

The following are stories about and techniques for team retrospectives, multiteam retrospectives, initiative retrospectives, and one-on-ones, followed by a discussion of survey tools and metrics to apply as feedback loops.

So let’s get started, with a discussion of retrospectives at the team level.

Team Retrospectives

We can learn, grow, and change as people, teams, and organizations. One way we do this is by having regular retrospectives with our teams. These can be facilitated by coaches or anyone who wants to hold the space for teams to reflect on what has happened in their teams in the past in order to make decisions about how they should be different in the future. Teams themselves can be empowered to derive the experiments they want to try out in order to change.

Reteamings can be experiments that fall out of retrospectives, which might lower the fear of trying out team changes, especially if the team compositions have been the same for a while. As one of my interviewees, Mark Kilby, put it, “If it doesn’t work ...