Retrospectives NewsLetter 📰

Things in this Newsletter 🗞️

• 💡Continuous Improvement Ideas

• 🪞 End-of-Year Reflection: Looking Back, Carrying …

  • 1. Look for Patterns, Not Moments

  • 2. What Are You Carrying Forward?

  • 3. What Are You Ready to Put Down?

  • 4. One Question to Carry Into the New Year

  • 🧠 Quick Facilitator’s Tip

  • 🔥 Things You Might Like

  • 💡 Did You Know?

🌟 Editor’s Note

Welcome to another Retro Newsletter. If this is your first time here, I highly recommend reading this newsletter first. It will give you the basics.

The end of the year often comes with pressure.

Pressure to celebrate loudly.
Pressure to extract lessons.
Pressure to set shiny new goals for January.

So here is something different, something a little softer. Instead of rushing to resolutions, this issue is about making sense of the year that was, noticing patterns, and intentionally choosing what we want to carry forward and what we need to leave behind. What’s complete and what wants to emerge.

Think of this as:

• Part reflection

• Part meaning-making

• Part quiet intention

It’s great for the end of the year, but it’s especially useful at any kind of threshold when things are changing and shifting.

💡Continuous Improvement Ideas

• Year-End Pattern Board – Capture recurring themes from retros across the year in one place.

• Carry-Forward List – Keep a visible list of practices you intentionally want to protect next year.

• January Gentle Retro – Start the new year with reflection before planning it sets a very different tone.

🪞 End-of-Year Reflection: Looking Back, Carrying Forward

Here are some great ways to reflect on the year. For each of these sections, you could follow the 3 phases: gather the data, generate insights, and decide what to do. Or you could pick one section and use only that for your retro. If you pick one section, you can use a timeline to gather the data, then ask these questions as a way to generate insights. Each will give you a different lens or perspective, and depending on your team and how connected they are with each other, different insights and ideas.

1. Look for Patterns, Not Moments

When we reflect on a whole year, it’s easy to focus on standout highs or lows. Instead, try zooming out. Get the team to think about the year as a whole. If it’s tricky for the team to remember what happened, you can always prefix this with a timeline, but this can also be the data.

Ask the team:

• What themes kept repeating this year?

• What conversations resurfaced again and again?

• What tensions never quite went away?

• What quietly worked, even if we didn’t celebrate it at the time

Patterns tell us more than single events. They show us how we actually operate, not just what happened once. This will help surfact those patterns. I would still have people add these individually to sticky notes, then have everyone share and create clusters of the themes, or use the timeline to see what's there, find the themes and patterns, and create clusters to discuss.

Make sure to invest time in the conversation about what the team thinks is keeping these patterns in place.

2. What Are You Carrying Forward?

Not everything from this year needs to be “improved” or replaced.

Some things are worth carrying forward, even protecting. This is about setting up well for next year, highlighting achievements and being deliberate and intentional about what was awesome. Again use a timeline to help get to the things that stood out or have teams o back and look at their calendars. As humans, we all have a recency bias, so for all of these, try to encourage the team to find ways to think about the whole year that don’t only rely on memory.

Get the team to consider:

• What practices supported us when things were hard?

• What relationships deepened trust or safety?

• What ways of working felt sustainable or energising?

These are signals. And they can be easy to lose if we don’t name them.

3. What Are You Ready to Put Down?

End-of-year reflection is also a chance to release. Sometimes humans just need to put stuff down. 2025 has been a difficult year for many people in many different ways. It felt like things were closing and finishing. So now is the opportunity to decide what is complete and what you don’t want to carry into 2026, or what the team needs to put down or let go of to make things lighter or easier.

Ask gently:

• What are we still doing out of habit, not value?

• What expectations did we carry that no longer fit?

• What drained energy without giving much back?

Letting go doesn’t require replacing something immediately. Sometimes it’s enough to simply say: “We don’t need to take this with us.”

4. One Question to Carry Into the New Year

Instead of resolutions, try choosing one guiding question. A question you don’t need to answer yet, just live with. This is a wonderful, challenging close for a retro of this kind. We can put something out there for us to percolate on or reflect on over the holidays. A subconscious prompt, but nothing that needs an answer right now. Something that gets us thinking.

Examples:

• What does “enough” look like for us next year?

• Where do we want to be more intentional?

• What kind of conversations do we want more of?

• What would it mean to work at a more human pace?

Good questions create better futures than rushed goals.

🔏 Close:

This is a wonderful way to create a pause and a full stop, for a year, a cycle or a threshold.

🧠 Quick Facilitator’s Tip

Slow the ending down.

If you’re running an end-of-year retro, leave more time for the close than you normally would. A quiet reflection round or written takeaway helps people integrate the conversation instead of rushing back to “what’s next.” You could use the one question to take away as a way to do this.

🔥 Things You Might Like

• 🫟 The amazing Cara Turner is doing:

  • Finding your niche focus https://www.quicket.co.za/events/352507-innovation-strategy-part-1-finding-your-niche-focus - Jan 6 and 8

  • Creative Problem Solving https://www.quicket.co.za/events/352642-creative-problem-solving-break-through-challenging-problems

• 🎮  Gartic Phone 👉 https://garticphone.com. A chaotic, hilarious mix of telephone and drawing. Players write prompts, draw interpretations, then guess what they see.

• 📖 Tool: Go retro and invest in paper journals for the team. There is a magic in writing by hand, where the brain needs to slow down and deliberate and intentional reflection can take place.

💡 Did You Know?

There’s a Unicode character for a “shrug.” ¯(ツ)/¯ It’s not an emoji — it’s a carefully constructed piece of typographic art that survived copy-paste across decades.

Till next time and into the new year,

Jo