The Yearwalk 2.0 2.0
By: Anders Gran
Tags: Startup, Christmas, Teamwork, Business Strategy, Workshop

A 2020 workshop venue

In order to move on, closure is key. For our minds to focus on challenges ahead, we need to ‘land’ what’s behind us. When working in teams in high paced projects, this also involves agreeing on what history is and what we learn from it.

Some time ago I wrote a piece on doing a full year retrospective called The Yearwalk (read that post here, it’s quick, I promise). This year is not like any other. The forums we took for granted are no longer an option.

Nevertheless we still need to curate our teamwork and make sure we capture learnings along the way.

Since start the Twiik team have had remote teams with development teams in both Malmö and Stockholm, Sweden which have gotten us used to collaborating remotely. The Covid-19 pandemic pushed this way of working to new levels and when planningthe 2020 annual Christmas get-together we went all digital.

Trust is key (still)

The basics of the exercise is to make use of the collective memory, create a mutual picture of the history and a common understanding of future needs. Both organizationally and product wise.

Security and trust is a foundation for being able to dig up not only this year’s big wins but also the f***-ups, skeletons in the closet and potential regrets.

Trust is something that is built over time. In my experience this comes from handling small and big conflicts in times of pressure. When doing retros face-to-face, there are multiple ways of accelerating the trust in a room. Things liek trust circles, candle lighting (yes it works) and open check-ins. When doing it digitally one need to work a little bit harder to set a scene, but the same principles apply.

Creating the right conditions

As a facilitator I cannot fully control the physical settings for my team when they are working remote. However there things to be done.

Scope wisely: Normally we run these as two-day workshops, making use of valuable facetime. Considering attention span and engagement, I designed the online version to be two hours. This means that scope of the wokrshop is cut down to a minimum focusing on the following desired outcomes: A chance to move above daily operations, A sense of closure of 2020 and finally paving the way for planning 2021.

Normally we run these as two-day workshops, making use of valuable facetime. Considering attention span and engagement, I designed the online version to be two hours. This means that scope of the wokrshop is cut down to a minimum focusing on the following desired outcomes: A chance to move above daily operations, A sense of closure of 2020 and finally paving the way for planning 2021. Set the scene. 2020 has been a year of many challenges, but also our greatest year by any metric possible! We’ve trippled our monthly active users, we’ve landed fantastic customers and the Twiik app and marketplace have taken huge steps feature wise. Still, we are a small team, fighting very hard for each win and doing so until continously.Hence, I wanted the framing for the get-together and retro to really celebrate our wins as much as high light needs for improvement. Prior to the workshop I ordered small workshop kits to be sent home to the team members. The kits we re not to be opened until in the workshop when we were all together. The contents were actually a bottle of champagne and a small box of fine chocolates.

The actual workshop

We ran the workshop using a commbination of Google Meet and Google Jamboard. I had prepared a Jamboard with a few slides and workspaces to

We had 3 main activities:

1. Check-in: to be present and avoid people being mentally stuck in daily work during the workshop. I asked the simple question: “what’s on your mind right now, that you need to park for now”.

2. Three wishes for Q1: Knowing from experience, members of all disciplines from the team carry wishes for the future. This could be anything from more resources, clearer prioritization to new platform features. As the team is in constant “forward mode” this often distract the dicussions about history. The latter being the actual focus of the workshop. To deal with this, I asked the team to list three things they wanted from Q1 2021. We jointly discussed the wishes and put them on a timeline on our jamboard.

3. The Yearwalk: This is very much like previous years. I had prepared a timeline — just marking January 2020 and December 2020.

Again, being different from a pure retro, I wanted this session to allow for celebration of the hard work put in by the team. We jointly opened our gift boxes and gave a toast to our greatest year so far. We looked at a few key metrics to really emphasize the actual wins of the year.

Following that, the team then spent 10 minutes creating post-its and placing them along the timeline. The discussion was flowing freely, helping team members to both remembering new events as well as slotting them into the right point in time.

Once we felt that there were no more to be added, one of the team members did a Yearwalk and took us through the year, month by month, event by event. We discussed learnings and our experience with out focusing toom uch on cementing action.

Normally we would have finished this part off by each team member placing a candle on one of the events along the timeline and sharing their story of why this particular event was important to them. We skipped this part given the short time, but I would definitely work placing a virtual candle on Jamboard.

We ended with a brief checkout letting the timeline sink in individually.

Moving on from here

Like I wrote in the beginning of this short post, “In order to move on, closure is key”. When zooming out, it would seem as we did things in reverse order by doing a future outlook before agreeing on the past. However, this workshop should be seen as one step in a process. Mid January, we will plan our coming year, starting from the 3 wishes exercise, repeating the learnings from the Yearwalk workshop and taking actions on what we found. This second workshop will close the retrospective circle.