A futurespective asks a team to look into the future at their upcoming work, projects or events and decide what their goals are, what success will look like, but also figure out what could cause them problems.
A futurespective is great for:
A retrospective looks back at events that have already happened, whereas a futurespective looks ahead to a future goal and what stands in the way. A futurespective usually covers a wider range of time than a retrospective.
The Hopes and Concerns exercise asks team members to open up and communicate what they’re optimistic or worried about. Reviewing the Hopes together is motivating for the group, who can then use that energy to collectively address the Concerns. This exercise is great for the beginning of a workshop.
The first futurespective I ever ran was a Hopes and Concerns exercise with a client team at the beginning of a quarterly planning workshop. We covered a lot of topics that cleared the air, and realised that addressing the Concerns together was more effective than filling in a RAID Log that no one ever reads!
Get the team to work from the goal backwards (in this case the tropical island is your goal), then focus on the things that help and prevent the team’s boat from reaching the island.
The ‘News Headline’ is a creative futurespective - imagine a future where a newspaper is reporting the team’s success on their front page. To run this futurespective, split the group into small teams and have them create:
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