Retrospective Ratio

The metric that measures the proportion of an operations team’s learning activity that is forward-looking (anticipating problems and designing prevention) versus backward-looking (analysing failures that have already occurred). High-performing operations teams maintain a 60:40 prospective:retrospective ratio.

Teams that only conduct postmortems after failures (100% retrospective) are permanently reactive. Teams that only conduct prospective planning without retrospective learning miss improvement cycles. The optimal ratio acknowledges that both are essential.