Every morning, I ask my team to stand in a circle to have a 5 minute meeting.

Everyone answers 3 questions:

1. What did I accomplish yesterday?
2. What will I accomplish today?
3. What is in my way?

At the end of the sprint (in our case, one week of work), we review how we did.

This is called the Sprint Retrospective.

We look at how much stuff we did and whether we did the right stuff by asking two questions:What went well? (So we might replicate those things in the next sprint)What could we improve?From there, we turn the most notable things into action items, sometimes requiring teams to assemble around them.

It sounds straightforward and easy, but do you know what the hardest part about this is?

Not skipping the meeting.It feels like it’s just this one time or that we don’t really need to have the meeting because not that much stuff happened this week . . .

I’ve never run a Sprint Retrospective that hasn’t generated meaningful action items.

It’s this discipline, early on in your work that is the compounding interest of your project.By staying the course, you will continuously be aligned as a team, you will be focused on the right work, and you will have a team that feels capable in the face of challenges.

2 Minute Action

Since it’s Saturday, chances are you just finished a work week.Take today’s 2 minutes to ask yourself “what went well?” and “what could be improved?”