It's Your Fault Retrospective

Retrospective of "It's Your Fault" session at the 2014 Self.Conference in Detroit

Immediately after our self.conference session "It's Your Fault", Gerry and I took a few moments to discuss the session feedback, what went well, what we could do better, and what we would toss out if we were to do this talk again.

Participants rating of the session was about 4.7 out of 5. Some things that helped make it successful that I would do over is . .

• communicating learning objectives early in the session
• capturing participants thoughts on key topics instead of feeding them all the answers
• allowing the audience to apply techniques we introduced so they feel as if they can utilize them immediately
• annotating the session Kanban stickies with approximate time we should get to that topic to help us monitor time
• incorporating music as participants walked in, during activities, and leaving the session to set the tone for a relaxed an open atmosphere
• soliciting participant feedback on how to improve with a rating of 1 needs work to 5 awesome with suggestions of improvements
• investing the time to create an engaging slide deck
• creating a blog article and posting before the session so participants can immediately access session details and additional information

But there was still room for improvement. The session was fast paced and jammed with a lot of information and exercises to keep within our 50 minute time box. Therefore the session felt a little bit rushed and if we had more time we would of loved to provide . . .

• more time for the audience to get settled in
• more examples of real experiences
• little stronger connection/tie-in of the learning objectives with session activities
• demonstration of the perfection game for participants before they tried it out
• more time to answer audience questions
• a recorded session for participants to refer back too (the slide deck received over 350 views in an hour after posting but I wonder how beneficial it was without the details recorded)

I look forward to the opportunity to do this session again.

Read the original blogpost on the session here: 

http://curiousagility.blogspot.com/2014/05/its-your-fault.html

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