Situation – Your organization, department, or team has just reached its year-end. Your staff is ready to refine plans for the next year based on this year’s performance. You want to reflect on the journey of the whole year with its ups and downs.

Rational Objective – Harvest what the group has learned from the experience of the past year and be prepared to apply them to the year ahead.

Experiential Aim – Appreciate and affirm the year’s journey, the accomplishments and the group’s wisdom.

The Beginning Point – The concrete beginning point for this conversation is the past year, as it happened. The group must begin with objective information, the facts and events of the past year. It may be helpful to review any relevant, objective data you have on the year, such as information on finances, statistics on sales or services, data on customers or staffing or whatever information provides an objective picture of what happened.

Using this Conversation – You will need to tailor this conversation for your own specific situation. Is the time frame appropriate? A group may need to reflect on a project that has been in progress for 18 months or the group’s work over the past three months.

Look at the objectives of the conversation.  They may need to be more specific or more focused.

You will need to add, remove or modify the questions will be specific to your group. For example: a Board of Directors may focus on its own performance and roles. A business organization may want to focus on performance in relation to financial projections or reflection on a major project. A working team may include more on how the group worked together.

This conversation will require about an hour in order to enable the participants to elicit meaning from the experience of the past year. If this conversation is a warm-up for a planning session, it can be done quickly and impressionistically in 20 – 30 minutes.  Focusing on key ideas, keeping the pace up and not attempting to articulate all of the details can compress the conversation.

Applications – This conversation can be used for any group that needs to reflect on its experience. It can be used as a personal reflection as well.

A Conversation on Reviewing the Year

Opening - Before we plan for the coming year, it would be good to reflect on the last year—a year full of victories, challenges and great learning experiences.

Objective Questions

• What have been some of the key events for you in the past year? (Go around the room.)
• What major projects have we have worked on?
• What minor projects?
• Are there any other events you remember?

Reflective Questions

• What was this year like for us? an earthquake – a bear – a squirrel?
• Which of the events had you forgotten about?
• What was the big surprise of the year?
• When were you most frustrated? – the low points?
• Which events made a big difference to you—changed how you thought or felt?

Interpretive Questions

• What have been our greatest accomplishments?
• As you reflect on all of this, how would you talk about what we have
• achieved this year?
• What have we learned from our experience of this year? From our successes – our challenges – our work together

Decisional Questions

• As you think ahead to the year, how will our experience of this year and our learnings affect what we do next year?
• What are we saying we want to do differently?
• What will enable us to take the next giant steps into the future?
• What will you do to integrate what we have discovered into your work?

Closing

This has been a fine reflection on the year. I’ve gained some new insights into our experience, as I am sure we all have. I’ll get these learnings and the other insights from the conversation typed up and circulated to everyone. We will meet again next week at the same time.

Thank you for your participation and your insight.