This can be tricky, but it’s quite easy to start.

Setup: Imagine today is exactly one year from now. Add some categories, like areas of your company or team. You can use note colors to define categories. You can split the timeline into something usual to you, like quarters. You can add high (+) / low (-) values to understand about confidence.

Now, action! What happened, starting from today (remember we fast forward to one year later) to one year ago?

What to expect?

• People add a lot into first three months, and little to final months. That’s a sign that you need to share more about strategy and tactics.
• People add fine granular items to first months and high granular items to final months. What about the middle? What is the company roadmap? Are there any goals?
• People don’t know what can happen in other areas besides their own. Are you aware of other people and teams objectives?
• People become curious about what other teams are up to. Make people talk. Make them share their execution and current plans.

It’s important to understand what your team knows about the future. Some people may be too much inside operations and little into tactics. This is the time to bring people together.

You can use a retrospective to understand how can we make the next cycle better. You use a futurespective to understand where we are going. What are we thinking? What are our needs?

— Daniel Wildt

Extra: here’s a template you can use to run a futurespective. This one was built using Mural.