You may have heard of something called retrospective, a very well known agile practice, a ritual gathering of a community at the end of a project to review the events and learn from the experience.

Lately I’ve learnt about the concept of futurespective: it’s very interesting and very ‘positive’.

Here is a kind of explanation of what a futurespective is from his inventor, Tim Mackinnon, that I met at the Italian Agile Day 2007 thanks to my friend Marco:

Participants are asked to imagine that they have stepped into a time machine and have teleported to a time just after the completion of their project (which in reality is just starting). As the project was a success, its sponsors are keen to do a project retrospective (and so we are examining the future past).

As we know the project was a success, there are many successful events which should be recorded on the timeline […], however there may also have been some things that potentially didn’t go well […].

Once the future timeline has been created, participants are then asked to step back and mine it in the way similar to a normal timeline, “what went well”, “what can we do differently” and finally what actions should we take for the upcoming project.

PierG