Every year at this time, I do a structured retrospective.
Not a goals review — that comes separately. This is a reflection on the year itself: what it felt like, what it taught me, what I wish had been different, what I want to carry forward.
I've tried a lot of formats. The one I keep coming back to is the 4L retrospective: Loved, Learned, Longed For, Loathed.
It's simple enough to actually complete and specific enough to be useful.
Loved: What Energized Me This Year
The things I loved about this year are the signal about what to do more of. Not just what produced good outcomes — but what I actually wanted to show up for. What I thought about on weekends. What I'd do even if nobody was asking.
This year, I loved the work of building frameworks. The act of taking a pattern I was seeing across many customer situations and articulating it precisely enough that others could use it. There's something genuinely satisfying about that — the compression of experience into structure.
I loved the conversations that happened at the edge of someone's certainty — where a customer or colleague was genuinely trying to figure something out, not looking for validation of a decision already made. Those are the conversations where I feel most useful.
Learned: What Changed How I Think
The most valuable learning this year wasn't a new skill. It was a revision of a belief I held with too much confidence.
I believed that organizational change happened primarily through senior leadership commitment. Get the executive sponsor aligned, and the adoption follows.
The evidence this year pointed somewhere more complicated. Executive commitment is necessary. It's not sufficient. The actual mechanism of adoption is the middle layer — the managers and team leads who translate executive intent into team behavior. Organizations where the executive wants adoption but the middle management is indifferent to it stall. The executive alignment creates the conditions. The middle layer creates the reality.
I've adjusted my frameworks accordingly.
Longed For: What I Wished Had Gone Differently
I longed for more deep-work time. The year was full of high-quality interaction and short on uninterrupted thinking time. That's a function of the role and its demands, and I'm not complaining about the role. But the ratio of action to reflection got out of balance.
The work I'm most proud of — the frameworks, the writing, the thinking that has real longevity — came from protected time to think without an agenda. I want to protect more of that next year.
Loathed: What I Want to Do Less Of
I loathed the interactions where I could see the outcome from the beginning but had to go through the process anyway. Every organization has these — the meetings that exist to manage stakeholders rather than to make decisions, the reviews that are really performances, the processes that were originally useful and have become ritual.
I want to get better at naming these gracefully and redirecting the time. Not being disruptive — being clear that the time could be better spent.
The Practice
The 4L retrospective is useful because it's honest in a way that goals reviews are not. Goals reviews celebrate wins and explain misses. The 4L asks simpler questions: what was good? what changed? what do I want more of? what do I want less of?
Those questions, answered honestly, produce better inputs to the next year's plans than any goal-setting framework I've used.
If you're looking for a year-end reflection practice that actually produces something useful — try this one.
Views are personal.