Introduction To “Run Post”:
The Term “Run Post” Can Indicate Many Things Depending On The Situation. It Can Be A Social Media Post About Running, A Blog Post On A Website Dedicated To Running, Or Even A Particular Kind Of Information Regarding Fitness And Running. The Purpose Of This Guide Is To Examine The Several Facets Of “Run Post,” Offering An Understanding Of Its Importance, Uses, And Influence On The Running Community.
Defining “Run Post”:
Defining The Term:
• Social Media Context: A “Run Post” Is A Social Media Post That Details A Runner’s Experience, Accomplishments, Or Learnings.
• Blogging Context: It Can Also Refer To Running-Related Blog Posts On Websites Where Athletes Discuss In-Depth Topics Including Diet, Training, And Personal Experiences.
• Content Creation: Examine The Various Ways That “Run Post” Is Used To The Production Of Written Articles, Films, And Other Types Of Running-Related Content.
“Run Post”‘S Objective:
A post-mortem meeting is your team’s shovel – a tool for uncovering these insights. Post-mortems are an opportunity to come together, dig deep into a project or incident, and determine what went wrong. The process isn’t a blame game but a way to learn, grow, and turn hindsight into foresight.
By the end of this article, you’ll know exactly how to run a productive post-mortem with your team. We’ll cover the following topics:
What is a post-mortem meeting?
A post-mortem meeting is a team workshop for reflecting on a failed project or significant incident. Unlike its counterpart, the pre-mortem meeting, which anticipates potential problems before they occur, a post-mortem meeting happens after the fact.
During a post-mortem, your team examines the events leading to an incident or project failure, much like a coroner doing an autopsy. The goal is to find the root causes of issues, learn from them, and develop strategies to prevent similar problems in the future.
When to run a post-mortem meeting?
Projects, like people, only have post-mortems when something has gone horribly wrong. You can learn how to prevent similar problems by understanding a project failure or incident.
You should consider holding post-mortems meetings in the following situations:
- After a project failure or critical issue. When a project doesn’t achieve its goals or faces a big blocker that slows progress, a post-mortem meeting helps get to the root causes of such problems.
- Following a significant incident or outage. After a big problem like a server crash or an app outage, a post-mortem meeting lets you figure out what went wrong and define actions to prevent future incidents.
- When a client relationship ends unexpectedly. A post-mortem meeting can provide insights into why a customer left so you can improve other client relationships and your retention strategies.
- If the cost of failure was high. When failure results in substantial financial, reputational, or operational costs, a post-mortem meeting helps understand the impact and how to ensure such costly failures don’t happen again.
- After reaching a significant project milestone. Conducting post-mortem meetings after key milestones of larger projects helps catch minor issues before they become major problems.
What are the benefits of a post-mortem meeting?
Post-mortems are an invaluable tool for practicing continuous improvement within your team or organization. Here are the meeting’s biggest benefits.
Thorough understanding of root causes:
By analyzing the events, actions, and decisions that led to a failure, problem, or incident, your team can identify the root causes of issues instead of just addressing symptoms.
For example, if a software release introduced a bug that caused system downtime, rather than simply fixing the bug, a post-mortem meeting could identify the root cause as insufficient testing protocols. Without this understanding, similar bugs could appear in future releases.
Enhanced team collaboration and learning:
Every failure carries valuable lessons. Since post-mortem meetings are collaborative, they allow team members to share their perspectives and insights about a project or incident. This process creates a culture of transparency, mutual respect, and shared learning. Sharing openly can also improve psychological safety.
Stronger ownership of problems:
A post-mortem meeting’s collective approach to problem-solving instills a sense of ownership among team members. When everyone shares responsibility for finding solutions, your team is more likely to see through these initiatives.
Optimized decision-making and project planning:
Insights from a post-mortem can improve your team’s decision-making process. By understanding what went wrong, why, and how, your team can make more informed decisions in the future.
Habitual continuous improvement:
By consistently learning from failures through post-mortem meetings, your team creates a habit of self-assessment and learning. Such continuous improvement leads to a proactive, adaptive mindset that drives success across all your projects and initiatives.
How to conduct a post-mortem meeting?
Setting the rules and scene at the beginning of the meeting creates a positive and productive environment for your post-mortem discussion. Here are some guidelines to ensure a smooth discussion:
Set the rules and scene:
Setting the rules and scene at the beginning of the meeting creates a positive and productive environment for your post-mortem discussion. Here are some guidelines to ensure a smooth discussion:
- Focus on the situation, not individuals. Encourage participants to focus on the events, decisions, and processes that led to the project outcome rather than on the actions of specific individuals.
- Promote open and respectful discussion. Ensure all participants feel respected and heard. Everyone’s input is valuable, and different viewpoints help paint a more complete picture of what happened.
- Emphasize learning and improvement. The primary goal of a post-mortem is learning from a project and using these insights for future improvements. Remember this goal throughout the meeting, and steer the conversation towards identifying lessons learned and solutions.
Choose a project post-mortem template:
Post-mortems often fail to deliver results when they lack structure, making it difficult for team members to contribute effectively or define follow-up action items.
A well-structured template or agenda organizes the meeting in clear phases and provides prompts your team can respond to.
The easiest way to start following such a structure is with Parabol’s pre-built templates for different project types and scenarios. These templates provide a framework for your meeting, guiding your team through the analysis step by step.
To start your post-mortem meeting in Parabol, click the button below, navigate to “retrospectives,” and choose one of the post-mortem templates.
Reflect on what went wrong:
Ask your team to note down reflections according to the prompts in your template. You may consider reflecting on what went wrong, why something went wrong, any early warning signs of what was going wrong, or even how to prevent issues recurring in future.
Parabol offers a way for all team members to easily reflect on these questions with anonymous responses to preserve psychological safety.
Group failures into themes:
Grouping problems into themes can provide a higher-level view of patterns and recurring issues within your projects or incidents. It’s not uncommon to discover a common thread between seemingly unrelated issues.
For example, consider a situation where one issue happened because of misunderstandings in email communication, another due to a lack of clarity during team meetings, and a third because of problems with your project management tools. Each problem could be a root cause in the previous step, but grouping them reveals a more systematic issue of “communication breakdown.”
You can group failures into themes in a few simple steps:
- Review all identified issues. Read out all the root causes from the previous step.
- Identify commonalities. Look for commonalities between the problems, like similar causes, effects, or other factors.
- Create theme groups. Create groups or “themes” of failures based on the identified commonalities.
- Refine groups. Review your groups and make sure they accurately represent the failures. If necessary, create new groups, merge existing ones, or move issues between them.
It’s ok if some reflections don’t fit into any group. The goal is finding patterns and common themes to guide your next steps.
In Parabol, your team can easily group issues in real-time through a multiplayer drag-and-drop interface. The tool can even automatically group like-minded reflections together, giving you a head-start and saving more time for your discussion.
Prioritize topics by voting on them:
Ask team members to vote on which themes they think are the most significant or likely to have caused the project to fail. As a facilitator, you can guide team members to base their votes on the likelihood of occurrence, the magnitude of the issue, or both.
In Parabol, the facilitator can set how many votes each team member gets.
We recommend giving each team member six votes and suggest voting in a 3-2-1 pattern. The most critical issue to a team member gets a three, the second a two, and the third a one. This approach results in more precise prioritization, which can be valuable when the team needs to decide where to focus their improvement efforts first.
When everyone has voted, and you reveal the outcome, you should have a prioritized agenda of discussion topics for the next step.
Discuss and set action items:
After finding the most critical issues through voting, tackle them one-by-one to come up with preventive solutions. This step is crucial for turning insights into lessons and actions.
Encourage team members to suggest solutions for each of the prioritized issues. Your goal is to generate as many ideas as possible. Parabol includes a discussion thread to keep track of suggestions or drop in thoughts via text if it’s hard to get a word in.
Remember to create an action plan and follow-up tasks as you work through each theme. With Parabol, you can do this directly in the meeting and export those items to a task management tool like Jira or GitHub.
What happens next?
The goal of a post-mortem is not just to identify what went wrong but to ensure you don’t repeat the same mistakes in the future—real value comes from the actions you take after the meeting.
Once you finish your post-mortem meeting, Parabol automatically sends a summary to everyone, including an overview of follow-up actions. Here’s how you can make sure the team completes these tasks:
- Monitor progress. Regularly check the progress of the action items. You can do this during regular team meetings or a dedicated follow-up session.
- Share the knowledge. Share the findings and lessons learned with the rest of the organization to promote a learning culture and continuous improvement.
- Review in future meetings. In your future post-mortems, review the action items from previous meetings to ensure closure.
Alternative Post-Mortem Methods:
Here are a few alternative methods for running a post-mortem meeting that may suit your needs.You can add these steps as part of the approach documented above, or run these as standalone exercises.
Review the timeline of events:
Create a detailed timeline of the project or incident. Include all events, decisions, and actions, even those that may seem insignificant. This comprehensive review helps you understand the sequence of actions and decisions that led to the undesired outcome.
As you review the timeline, encourage everyone on the team to share their perspectives and experiences. Different team members may have different thoughts on what happened and why. These diverse viewpoints provide valuable insights you can use to analyze the root causes of a problem during the next step.
Analyze the root cause:
In this step, you’ll dig deep into each problem and ask “why” it happened. You can use a model like “5 Whys” to help get to the bottom of issues.
The 5 Whys technique involves asking “why” five times, or as many times as needed, to get to the root cause of a problem. For example, if a project missed its deadline, you might ask:
- Why did the project miss its deadline? The project took longer than expected.
- Why did the project take longer than expected? There were unexpected technical challenges.
- Why were there unexpected technical challenges? The team didn’t have the necessary technical skills.
- Why didn’t the team have the required technical skills? The team wasn’t properly trained.
- Why wasn’t the team properly trained? There was no budget for training.
By the end of this process, you’ve identified the root cause of the problem (”lack of budget for training” in this case), which you can then address to prevent similar issues in the future.
Another helpful tool for root cause analysis is the Fishbone Diagram, also known as the Ishikawa Diagram or Cause and Effect Diagram. This tool helps you visualize the many potential causes of a problem, making it easier to identify the root cause.
The Reasons Behind Runners Posting:
• Motivation: Posters That Share Their Running Experiences Can Inspire Their Audience As Well As Themselves.
• Community Building: It Fosters A Sense Of Camaraderie Among Runners, Enabling Them To Interact And Provide Support For One Another.
• Monitoring Progress: Runners Utilize Postings To Monitor Their Advancement Over Time And Commemorate Their Accomplishments.
Establishing A “Run Post”:
How To Write A Successful Run Post:
• Content Planning: Choose The Topic Of Your Post; It May Be A New Jogging Route, A Training Session, Or A Recent Race.
• Seizing The Moment: Visually Record Your Experience With Pictures Or Movies.
• Composing The Post: Provide Interesting And Educational Stuff. Add Information On Time, Distance, Difficulties Encountered, And Personal Observations.
• Editing And Posting: Before Putting Your Content On The Platform Of Your Choice, Edit It For Impact And Clarity.
“Run Post” Platforms:
Where Should I Post?
• Social Media: Sharing Brief Updates And Images Is Common On Sites Like Facebook, Instagram, And Twitter.
• Running Apps: You Can Connect With Other Runners And Share Your Workouts With Apps Like Strava And Runkeeper.
• Websites And Blogs: Longer, More In-Depth Entries Work Best On Websites And Blogs That Are Actively Maintained.
Interacting With The Community Of Runners:
Creating Links:
• Interacting With Followers: Get Involved With Your Audience And Answer Comments To Create A Friendly Community.
• Working Together With Other Runners: Assist Each Other With Challenges Or Joint Posts.
• Taking Part In Challenges: Sign Up For Running Challenges And Use Posts To Document Your Progress.
Inspirational And Educative Content:
Things To Disseminate:
• Training Advice: Provide New Runners With Guidance, Performance-Enhancing Suggestions, And Your Own Training Regimens.
• Nutritional Advice: Share Meal Plans Or Recipes Along With Posts Discussing The Value Of Nutrition.
• Inspiring Tales: Tell Your Own Tales Of Conquering Challenges, Realizing Objectives, And Discovering What Spurs You On To Keep Running.
Assessing “Run Post”‘S Effect:
Examining Involvement:
• Metrics To Track: To Determine The Effectiveness Of Your Postings, Keep An Eye On Likes, Comments, Shares, And Follower Growth.
• Input And Adaptation: Make Use Of Audience Input To Enhance Your Material And Better Serve Their Interests.
Upcoming “Run Post” Trends:
New Developments:
• Video Material: More Runners Are Uploading Vlogs And Live Streams, Which Is Increasing The Appeal Of Video Material.
• Virtual Races: As Virtual Races Gain Popularity, There Are More Chances To Create Interesting “Run Post” Content.
• Technological Integration: More Data For In-Depth And Interesting Postings Is Made Available By Developments In Fitness Apps And Wearable Technology.
Summary, Accepting The “Run Post” Phenomenon:
“Run Post” Is About More Than Just Running Experiences Shared; It’s About Community Building, Motivating People, And Monitoring Personal Development. Running Enthusiasts Can Strengthen Their Bonds With One Another And Make Valuable Contributions To The Group’s Quest For Health And Fitness By Realizing The Importance Of Content Creation And Knowing How To Make It.
