Prespectives are better than Retrospectives

In a Retrospective you can see what you shouldn't have done, but the time is already wasted. In a Prespective, however, you can see what you are going to do that you shouldn't do, and you still can refrain from spending the time. It's so easy to save a lot of time.

When I was coaching a project, the boss was quietly listening to see what was happening. Suddenly he said (in Dutch): “Ah! In plaats van nádenken leer je ons vóórdenken.” Which means: “Instead of thinking after, you teach us to think before.” In Dutch the word for ‘to think about it’ is nadenken, which literally means ‘after-thinking’. He created the word ‘voordenken’, which is ‘before-thinking’. We thought: “Isn’t it weird that such an important word doesn’t exist?” Because most of my coaching is in English (Holland is small, our ‘abroad’ is larger than for most countries), I tried to find a similar combination. English already has ‘hindsight’ and ‘foresight’. But then I found that we have ‘to reflect’ and ‘reflection’ but not ‘to preflect’ or ‘preflection’. And when I encountered people using ‘retrospectives’ I thought we’d better use ‘prespectives’. Still weird that also in English I had to invent these important words. Since then I use words like “preflection”, “let’s preflect”, “shouldn’t we preflect” a lot in my coaching.