People always say that the first five years of marriage are the most challenging journey. Is that true? It depends. My blogger’s friend, who has been married for over 20 years, has a different point of view about this.
“It’s not only the first five years; every time of our marriage’s journey is also challenging. So, face it casually.” I still remember what she said while we stood in the crowd of train passengers.
Slightly, I disagree but agree as well. In my mind, I could make an analogy that a family or a couple is like an organization that runs towards noble purposes. Sometimes, I question why we don’t plan our marriage’s journey or envision the marriage’s journey like what the organization does.
Why do we let our marriage journey flow like water in the river?
If we treat our marriage’s journey like an organization, I believe that it’s not only the first five years we face the most challenging phase, but each time we face it. The world is volatile, and people say this is the VUCA era (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous).
Not only organizations who face VUCA, but families also face it. Who knows if our job or our couple’s job will last until the end of life? Who knows if we will have good health until the end of life? Who knows if our couple, our son or daughter, will leave last with us? We don’t know about the future.
I feel that I’m lucky to be working for my current company. My current company is an agile consultancy. My company has the noble purpose of helping the organization be agile so it can adapt quickly to any threats or changes.
I learned a lot about how we create achievable goals and how we design our way of working to achieve those goals. I know about OKR, Scrum, Design Thinking, Sprint Planning, Daily Sprint, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective. Those are terms in project management or the innovation process.
I saw all the frameworks above could be applied in my daily life. So, I initiated to invite my husband to do Sprint Retrospective and create OKR per quarter.
What is Sprint Retrospective and What’s For?
Actually, to understand the whole concept of Sprint Retrospective, we need to join the Scrum training. Woah, what is Scrum? I’ll explain it later. But, in short, Scrum is one of the frameworks in project management.
So, what is Sprint Retrospective? Sprint Retrospective is a Scrum Event, part of the Scrum where we gather our team to reflect on what went well and what needs improvement. Sprint Retrospective aims to break down the obstacles and create an improvement action list for Sprint’s next period.
How Did I Do a Sprint Retrospective with My Husband?
I’ve just done the sprint retrospective with my husband last year after we had a movie date yuhuu 🙂
In the cafe, with the sound of splashing river water, we sat together. On the table, just papers, sticky notes, and pens. At that time, we just did a simple retrospective. I gave my husband paper, sticky notes, and pens.
Then, my husband and I will write in the sticky notes these things:
- What are we grateful for? The first thing is to write what we are thankful for. Our long marriage journey had many ups and downs, but if we tried to note what we are grateful for, we would see many good rather than bad things. Even when bad things happen, we’ll see that as a lesson learned.
- What went well? We’ll reflect on any aspects of our marriage life, including personal, spiritual, financial, parenting, health, etc. What aspects are going well in those aspects, and do we need to continue again next time?
- What do we need to stop? This question invites us to reflect on what holds us back or makes us unproductive, so it can be bottlenecks to achieving our goals.
- How could we do things differently? After reflecting on what we must stop, we must reinvent new ways. We can’t expect different results with the same action, can we? So, this question triggers our mind to think about how we can do things differently in any aspect of life.
- What’s next? This is time to prioritize the action plan that we will focus on. Don’t forget to list and track all the action plans in the next sprint retrospective.
Have You Tried Doing Sprint Retrospective With Your Couple?
It was an exciting experience to do a sprint retrospective with my beloved husband. Our couple time become more productive. And after that, we have a clear path to achieve our goals.
As a couple and partner, husband and wife are lifetime organization. Why don’t we plan our lives like what organization does.
And in the last year, before beginning of 2024, we did Sprint Retrospective again with fun format. Are you curious how to do Sprint Retrospective for preparing the good year in 2024? Please stay tuned.
1 comment
I know Scrum from some of my remote-worker friends. I thought this was an application, but it turned out to be a way of retrospection.