Part 2 A retro template and activity for stewarding the closure of a team

How did I start off to design an appropriate retro for bringing the team to a close?

I knew I wanted to do something that would reflect the care we’d taken in building up our team culture.

I’ve seen a friend go through the motions of having to bring a charity to a close. As a result I was aware of the work of Stewarding Loss. They’re focus is on how to steward the closure of civil society organisations. There website has some valuable tools you can access for free. In particular the stewarding loss canvas prompts were super helpful. As I used them to frame the principles for the retro.

Summary of the activities

I will now briefly recap on the key activities I set-out for the retro which were aligned to session outcomes. I have included a Miro board PDF template at the end of this blog post if its use to anyone else in a similar situation.

I asked people to add asynchronously in advance of the meeting. This was intentional to give everyone their own time and space to reflect. This meant the team could use the time to review and discuss any key points that had come up from the pre-work. We had 2 hours allocated for the retro.

Framing the retro — principles

These were some of the key principles which set out the tone of the closure retro;

• Acknowledge that endings, as with beginnings are part of the inevitable cycle of renewal for people and organisations involved in change work
• Give space to emotions and the emotional journey we have been on
• We can harness the power of language and narrative with how we talk about the ending
• We keep the retrospective prime directive in mind when we reflect on the lessons learned

It’s always useful to reflect on the Prime Directive

Checking-in

It was super important to create psychological safety within the team when checking in for this retro. I set out these two activities.

• What are you here for and where are you coming from?

This helps to get the context of where the group are at in terms of expectations and the current headspace of participants.

• Where are you at on the grief/change curve — place on the timeline

This is also helpful for everyone to get a gauge of how the group is coping with the change and that everyone experiences it at different paces.

Wellbeing check-in using the grief cycle

Timeline reflection

A timeline reflection is helpful. As it allows everyone to feel like they have shared their contributions. As well as document collective achievements. It allows for a retrospective look back. So its easier to identify if there were any inflection points where things could have been done differently.

Outcome = Documented broader learnings from the journey of creating the CX Strategy team

Activities;

• Async add reflections to the board
• Share 1 key observation from reading everyone’s reflections
• Vote on key lessons and learnings to keep in mind for future initiatives

Timeline activity — a way to capture team achievements and reflections

History map activity

This needed a more recent timeline. Plus something with more nuanced reflections. It was simple yet a powerful way to get a shared view of the team’s experience.

Outcome = Identified lessons learned based on how the closure of a team is handled

• Took inspiration from HyperIsland toolkit
• Async add reflections to the board
• Flexibility with how you want to run this

History map — a helpful way to understand the timeline and impact of the changes

Stewarding loss closure canvass questions

I worked with the team to adapt some of the questions from the resources to better fit the organisational context we were in. These closure questions definitely helped to draw the team to a close by practically thinking about how things were archived and what aspects could live on elsewhere.

Outcomes;

• Acknowledged what can be taken forward into new teams and projects e.g. rituals
• Captured any final closure activities we need to do as a team

Relationship questions

Relationships are so important in endings. How we connect with others can help ease the challenges of a team coming to an end.

• How will we maintain relationships with people who are advocates and supporters of the work we’ve done?
• What other relationships do we need to keep building?
• Are there other relationships we can start to build as we work through our loss?

Artefact questions ( taken from stewarding loss)

As the team comes to a close we can create artefacts to exist way beyond the life of the team.

• What kinds of artefacts could we create? This might be a book, a series of events, a ritual for what we were part of, a manual. What would honour the work we did and make sure value isn’t lost?
• A living network can also be an artefact. Can you imagine how ‘XX team’ can live on as a network of people and relationships? Is this something that you want to cultivate? And if so, how might we do that?
• Collective archiving is a participatory process and something that can be done along the journey. What do you want to archive? How do you want to do it? Who can get involved? Where will it be archived?

I hope this blog post provides some helpful tips and suggestions. As I wrote it for anyone in the difficult situation of having to draw a team to a close.

It’s not a pleasant experience. But by writing and sharing this I hope to make it a bit less difficult for when someone has to do this.