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SKS process

A three-part retrospective that decides which concrete practices to discontinue, preserve, or initiate and assigns follow-through for the resulting changes.

Version
v1 · 2026-09-28 · History
Domain-specific #
12078
Domain group
Professional & Organizational Practice
Origin domain
Organizational & Management Science
Subdomains
Agile Retrospectives, Team Feedback Practices → Organizational & Management Science

Core Idea

SKS gives feedback a directional grammar. Participants describe observed practices and sort them into stop, keep-doing, and start, preventing strengths, harms, and missing behavior from being collapsed into one improvement list.

The headings are only the opening move. Useful sessions clarify evidence, resolve conflicting placements, prioritize within capacity, identify owners and measures, and return later to determine whether the chosen changes worked.

Structural Signature

Sig role-phrases:

  • Review scope — Defines the period, team, product, or relationship being discussed. It is frame. Counterfactual: Unbounded feedback becomes difficult to act on.
  • Observed practice — Names concrete behavior rather than a trait or grievance. It is object. Counterfactual: Labels such as 'communication' cannot be assigned meaningfully.
  • Stop category — Selects harmful, wasteful, or obsolete practice for discontinuation. It is decision. Counterfactual: Stopping a necessary control can create risk.
  • Keep category — Protects behavior already producing value. It is decision. Counterfactual: Retrospectives that discuss only problems can accidentally discard strengths.
  • Start category — Proposes a new behavior tied to a diagnosed gap. It is decision. Counterfactual: A wish without owner or capacity is not an action.
  • Follow-through — Assigns owners, timing, measures, and later review. It is control. Counterfactual: Categorization alone produces no improvement.

What It Is Not

  • It is not a personality-rating exercise.
  • It is not a traffic-light slide without action.
  • It is not permission to start unlimited work.
  • It is not evidence of improvement before follow-up.
  • Closest near-miss. A plus/delta retrospective identifies positives and changes; SKS additionally distinguishes practices to discontinue from genuinely new practices to initiate.

Scope of Application

  • Agile retrospectives. Reviews a sprint or release.
  • Performance conversations. Structures behavior-specific two-way feedback.
  • Customer research. Sorts requested service changes.
  • Project closeouts. Preserves successful practices and removes waste.
  • Organizational change. Builds a bounded action portfolio.

Clarity

State scope and period, participants, evidence for each practice, category rationale, conflicts, priority, owner, due date, success measure, capacity tradeoff, and review date. Preserve minority concerns even when not selected.

Manages Complexity

The framework reduces feedback complexity without turning every observation into a problem. Keeping an explicit category protects working capability, while stop and start can be balanced as a finite change portfolio.

Abstract Reasoning

  1. Define the retrospective scope and decision authority.
  2. Collect concrete practice observations with examples.
  3. Clarify and group overlapping items.
  4. Assign stop, keep, or start based on intended action.
  5. Prioritize, balance capacity, and name owners and measures.
  6. Review outcomes and reclassify in the next cycle.

Knowledge Transfer

The transferable cargo is disposition-based feedback with follow-through. It transfers across teams and relationships when observable practices and decision authority are clear; color labels alone do not.

Examples

Applied / In Practice

A team stops an unnecessary handoff, keeps short daily risk checks, and starts pairing on complex deployments, with owners and a two-sprint review.

Mapped back: scope → two sprints; follow-up → scheduled.

Applied / In Practice

Users ask a service to stop duplicate notices, keep human escalation, and start status tracking; the organization validates feasibility before committing.

Mapped back: source → customers; decisions → validated.

Applied / In Practice

A workshop posts vague words under colored headings and never chooses actions; it used the visual template but not the improvement process.

Mapped back: follow-through → none.

Structural Tensions

T1 — Simplicity versus Causal Depth. Three categories invite participation but can hide why a practice succeeds or fails.

Diagnostic: What evidence and mechanism support each item?

T2 — Voice versus Decision Authority. Open feedback surfaces experience while leaders may control priorities and resources.

Diagnostic: How are rejected suggestions explained?

T3 — New Action versus Capacity. Starting more work without stopping anything can overload the team.

Diagnostic: What tradeoff creates room?

Structural–Framed Character

SKS Process is framed: structurally a three-way action classification and governed by facilitation, psychological safety, authority, capacity, and feedback evidence.

Structural Core vs. Domain Accent

The core maps practices to discontinue, preserve, or initiate. Organizational practice adds retrospective cadence, participants, facilitation, customer voice, traffic-light visualization, prioritization, ownership, experiments, and review.

  • Approved root. No reviewed node entails this exact feedback disposition framework.

  • Related — retrospective, feedback, after-action review, plus/delta, continuous improvement, action item, and traffic-light method. These are settings or neighbors.

Neighborhood in Abstraction Space

SKS process sits in a crowded region of the domain-specific corpus (31st percentile for distinctiveness): several abstractions share nearly its structure, so a description that fits it tends to fit its neighbors too.

Family — Applied Assessment Frameworks & Practices (26 abstractions)

Nearest neighbors

Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-10-08

Not to Be Confused With

  • Start–Stop–Continue. Tell: A reordered name for substantially the same three dispositions.
  • Plus/Delta. Tell: Separates positives from changes but does not always distinguish stopping and starting.
  • Traffic-Light Status. Tell: Reports project condition rather than categorizing behavioral feedback.
  • Brainstorming. Tell: Generates ideas without necessarily deciding disposition or follow-through.

References

  • Frozen Wikipedia discovery revision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKS_process (revision 1229300876).
  • Preserved source candidate: https://hbr.org/2011/08/three-questions-for-effective-feedback
  • Preserved source candidate: http://www.researchrockstar.com/mission-possible-a-structured-approach-to-qualitative-analysis/

The frozen Wikipedia revision is discovery provenance. The retained source set was reviewed for identity, formal or operational relation, and scope. The encyclopedia's structural synthesis is bounded to those claims; a thin authority surface is recorded as a nonblocking source-strengthening repair rather than concealed.