SKS process¶
A three-part retrospective that decides which concrete practices to discontinue, preserve, or initiate and assigns follow-through for the resulting changes.
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.
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. Inclusion test: Require a defined review context, concrete evidence-linked practices sorted by intended disposition, and a follow-through mechanism for selected changes and continuations. Exclusion test: Exclude three unlabeled brainstorming lists, personal attacks, duplicate items placed in conflicting columns without resolution, and a colorful presentation with no decisions or accountability. Nearest boundary: A plus/delta retrospective identifies positives and changes; SKS additionally distinguishes practices to discontinue from genuinely new practices to initiate. Exit condition: The process fails when categories do not lead to observable owned behavior or later review. Common misclassifications: 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. Nearest named distinctions: Start–Stop–Continue: A reordered name for substantially the same three dispositions. Plus/Delta: Separates positives from changes but does not always distinguish stopping and starting. Traffic-Light Status: Reports project condition rather than categorizing behavioral feedback. Brainstorming: Generates ideas without necessarily deciding disposition or follow-through.
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¶
- Define the retrospective scope and decision authority.
- Collect concrete practice observations with examples.
- Clarify and group overlapping items.
- Assign stop, keep, or start based on intended action.
- Prioritize, balance capacity, and name owners and measures.
- 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.
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
- Competency-based recruitment — 0.90
- Behavioural design — 0.89
- Software Review — 0.89
- Management Practice — 0.88
- Dichotomous Statistical Thinking — 0.88
Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-10-08