In 2015 I was working in a social enterprise space, and some friends started porting some of our business tools to their personal relationships.
It started with Chelsea and Ants deciding to date… by running a series of time-bound experiments. - commit to dating for 1 week, then pause, reflect, decide whether to continue. Same again for 2, 4, 8 weeks. We laughed at them , but in short order several of us were doing periodic “retrospectives” on our relationships. My partner wrote a blog about our process – Running Agile Scrum on our Relationship (2016).
The Multiamory podcast iterated on our recipe, releasing RADAR. We were stoked to hear other people enjoying this pattern. RADAR is a great resource, though it’s a lot heavier that we can afford to run with small kids. The following is our current light-weight process.
A Primer on Iteration
TL;DR – continual improvement beats “perfect planning”
Businesses (and relationships) are complex systems in that they have a lot of moving, deeply inter-related parts, and are embedded in ecosystems. Navigating complex systems can be really challenging. There are a bunch of tools that can help, but my favourate is the “feedback loop”.
If you imagine navigating possibility space like wayfinding over an unknown terrain, your feedback loop is take a bearing (where are we now?), set a course (what should we move towards?), travel a bit, repeat:
This doesn’t preclude having a long term goal / desired destination, but it does acknowledge that you’re moving with a certain amount of “unknown”, and complex interactions may mean you find yourself “off-course” and need adjustments. What I really want to emphasise is that we discard the impossible ideal of “a perfect course to desired end” and replace it with “an ongoing journey of improvement”.
In software development we often use Scrum / Agile as a feedback loop to grow the code… but we ALSO apply the feedback loop to our team process (it’s part of the building, so why not?)
| Software dev. | Team process | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Take a bearing | What have we just built? | How we feeling about that last round? |
| 2. Set a course | What should we build next? | What should the team do different next round? |
| 3. Do a bit | Write software | Run team processes |
| 4. repeat |
In the context of a journey, this would be like a party evolving their roles/ protocols/ processes e.g. “hey the cook is sick… how about we each take a turn cooking for the next week?”.
Retrospective just means “look back”, but it’s often used as a short hand for the process where we get together and “Take a bearing” and “Set a course”. In an Agile/ Scrum context, there’s usually a time/ energy constraint – once again, the goal is not perfection, it is to use feedback loops to incrementally improve over time. As long as you trend in a good direction you’re winning. This means things like:
- we may surface 10 issues… but we don’t expect to “solve” them all, as long as we progress 1 of them in the next sprint, that’s progress
- we don’t know the the perfect solution to this issue… but we can “try something” and see how the system responds (and repeat).
Our Current Process
We run relationship retrospectives ~ once a month, and set aside 90 minutes uninterupted time for our process. This is a ritual which draws a bunch of energy, so I’d strongly advise not going over 90 minutes - it can burn you out. This was especially true once we had kids.
Here are the phases of our current process:
1. Load Context
Check-in by sharing how we’re currently feeling, what we’re arriving with e.g. I have a didn’t sleep well last night; I have a headache. Remember the last month, review our calendars, and speak out loud the important landmarks. e.g. We were all sick for a week; You finished your government contract; I finally got back to my exercise routine; We had that fight.
Why – In checking in and remembering the last month, we’re aligning our contexts. Knowing I have a headache helps us communicate better by improving your model of my current state. Being reminded of what we each found important helps prime us for things we might discuss, and factors that are going to feed into those conversations.
Notes – Try to avoid “processing” things here, as if you start processing here you may blow all your time on something that’s not the most important. Take the approach of a “reporter naming the facts” with a side of “smile/ laugh at the good bits”.
2. Possible Agenda
We write a bullet point list of things would could talk about. e.g. Anxiety about summer plans; How we’re sharing house-hunting labour; That fight we had.
Notes – Avoid “processing” here too
3. Prioritise
We decide the top 2-3 things we want to discuss today. We tend to ask ourselves
- are there any quick wins here?
- are any of these urgent?
- which of these are most important?
Why – It can be tempting to try and cover everything. Invariably if you do this, you end up either rushing / pressurising conversations that would have benefitted from the reverse (spaciousness / time), or you just run out of time and find you’ve discussed some bike-shed (superficial) topic while something really important was missed.
Notes – Prioritisation is personal, decide together. We like to tick a couple small / easy things off first, then process maybe 1-2 chunkier topics. If you feel like there’s not enough space / time for a topic (good noticing!), name it and perhaps ask “can we plan to dicsuss that another time?”.
4. Discuss
We move through prioritised topics one at a time. The aim is to
- share some context on the topic
- listen and be curious together about what’s going on
- ask ourselves “what could we try different?”
- write down what we agreed to as the final step in discussing a topic
Notes – We keep notes of “actions” (agreed things someone is gonna do, or changes in role/ process) in a shared Signal chat. We check the time and energy before launching into another topic – sometimes changing the priorities to fit what’s emerged as needed
⚠️ Alanna tells me this section deserves a LOT more detail. I stalled out publishing this… so maybe it’s enough for now to say you need to figure out what good processing looks like for your relationship - paying attention to optimizing for coherencem, connection, and sustainability.
5. Appreciation
We pause, take a breath, then share a bunch of things we appreciate – about our partner, our relationship, our life together. One person goes first and runs for a couple minutes while the other listens, then we switch. We finish with a hug.
Why – This whole process can be quite “problem-solving” heavy, and emotionally charged. I usually feel great about the connection and problem-solving, but this ensures we finish on a really sweet high.
What Retrospectives Miss
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