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Team exercise: ten steps for a team debrief / retro

Task: schedule a meeting with the core colleagues involved in your impact assessment activity

Time needed: up to 90 minutes (or more if the project has experienced some difficulties or has a more complicated context. We recommend that your meetings are no more than 90 minutes long, so consider additional meetings if you need to discuss more topics)

Checklist: before you start

• Schedule a meeting of between 45 minutes to 90 minutes. Invite colleagues who have been involved in the impact assessment. Ensure that everyone knows why you are meeting and what you are evaluating.

• Prepare your debrief/retro digital board or space. This should be accessible by everyone in the meeting. You can use the template in the appendix. Leave plenty of (digital) post-it notes close to the questions: 

  • What worked well? 

  • What didn’t work well? 

  • What can we improve next time? 

  • You can add additional prompts to each of these questions like those in the table below.

• Review any initial plan or objectives you created for your original impact assessment. Set these out on the board or shared document or share these in advance with participants (e.g. by attaching them to the meeting invitation).

• If people can’t attend, ask for their perspectives and/or share the digital board or document in advance. 

In the meeting

1. Agree what you want to achieve in your meeting: emerging with a list of recommendations that you can embed in future or ongoing work. 

2. Outline what part(s) of your impact assessment approach (activity) you will evaluate.

3. Agree whether your participants will contribute to the board directly or whether you need one central note-taker. Appoint a note-taker if necessary. 

4. If you are using a digital board, you might need to introduce your colleagues to how they can use it, e.g., add digital post-it notes, and how to navigate the digital board. 

5. Review the objectives of your original brief and impact assessment objectives as a group. 

   • What did you want to achieve through your impact assessment? Have you accomplished this? 

   • What were your success metrics (Phase one)? 

   • If anything you discuss is positive or negative, add it to the respective sections of your board. 

6. Discuss the first question:  what worked? (positive)

7. Discuss the second question: what didn’t work? (negative)

8. Ask your colleagues to spend two minutes individually reviewing the lists of what worked and what didn’t work. Then ask them to share what they would recommend as future improvements - answering Question 3. Capture this. 

9. Review the recommendations that you and your colleagues have captured. Are they all actionable? Have you attributed who would have to action these, and what barriers might stand in the way? You might have a lot of recommendations. Do you want to prioritise these?

10. Thank your colleagues and reflect on the value that what they have shared can add to your future work. You might want to reflect on the recommendations and edit these, so that they’ll be clear for you to use in the future. 

After the meeting

Save the materials (e.g. if you are using Miro, you can download a PDF) in a shared drive or other safe space. Share the link to the recommendations with everyone involved and anyone else whose work is involved. 

Tip: your colleagues might feel uncomfortable sharing criticism in front of others, particularly if it concerns others’ work. Encourage a respectful and critically constructive approach to sharing feedback by setting out how you would like your colleagues to participate. If you feel that the feedback might be quite sensitive to give in the meeting, you can share the questions with your colleagues via a Google form or other survey software and draw out the recommendations yourself.