Why I care about this
Nobody holds a retrospective on a shop that's already shut
At nineteen I opened a clothes shop with my best friend, near Aberdeen University, on a business loan. It did reasonably well for about a year.
We hadn't checked the planning permissions around us. The lease was cheap for a reason. Our road was turned into a building site, the student trade disappeared, and we were left with a five-year lease and a bank loan to pay.
We negotiated our way out, did a few side deals, worked the markets. It taught me exactly how much I didn't know. It also taught me that the most useful questions are the ones you ask before, not after.
A strategy retrospective is how a leadership team asks those questions while there's still time to act on the answers.