How to: Top Tips for a Successful Futurespective

Surprise🎉🎉🎉

Love them or loathe them, surprises at work can bring both learning opportunities and a burst of creative energy to your team.😄 However, surprises can often lead to business projects being overdue and overbudget. 😟

The trick to guaranteeing your team takes advantage of new opportunities is to promote positive workflows that encourage those bursts of creativity while avoiding blockers. One of the easiest ways to get your projects off right is to start with a futurespective.   

What is an agile futurespective? 

A futurespective meeting allows your team to proactively examine goals and acknowledge obstacles and fears before a project begins. Instead of looking back on a project like a traditional retrospective, a futurespective looks to the future of a project. 🔮 Encouraging teams to think about what is going to happen and what they can we do to ensure success before the project starts. 

Why run a futurespective? 

Your team will not know every issue that will come up against before the project starts. And some of the issues discussed may ultimately prove inconsequential to the team’s success.

 So, what’s the point? Why take the time out of your schedule to have a meeting that may not cover 💯 of the issues your team may face? 

One of the principles of the agile manifesto states: 

“Build projects around motivated individuals.

Give them the environment and support they need,

and trust them to get the job done.”

A futurespective allows the team to explore concerns and trepidations team members may face and work together to overcome them by proactively discussing solutions and systems to help relieve those concerns. A futurespective meeting can help motivate team members and give managers insights into how to help the team experience the success they envisioned. 

Facilitating A Futurespective 

Futurespective Templates 

The futurespective format is similar to a retrospective format, consisting of the ideation, grouping, voting, and discussion. What makes a futurespective different, is the team's mindset. 

The team thinks about what it will look like after the project is complete. It is a smashing success! 🎉🎉 Congratulations! 😉

Now that the team is picturing that success, they provide responses to four questions: 

• What did we do well? 
• What could we have done better? 
• What did we not do that we should have?
• What did we do that we should NOT have done?

Of course, we don’t have a crystal ball that helps us see into the future, so answering these questions can be challenging. Especially for teams that are newer to retrospectives.

The trick? Don’t overthink it. 

If your team has been working together for a while, you are probably already aware of some of the team’s bad habits that require work to overcome and issues outside of the team’s circle of influence that the team will need to work-around. 

But, if your team is newer and doesn’t have an established history of working together, the odds are you’ll need to come together to establish a shared understanding of where you’ve been and where you’re going. How? By focusing on common challenges the team has faced before, you can tap into previous experiences to avoid issues you have faced in the past with other teams.

 Or Ready to run a futurespective with your team? Free trial it up!!