Start, Stop, Continue is a simple feedback tool that can help you continually improve over time that works at both an individual and team level.
Many people struggle to both give and receive constructive feedback. Why? Because feedback can be uncomfortable. It can be uncomfortable to challenge your team’s performance, and it can be equally as uncomfortable to receive challenging feedback on your performance.
Because feedback can be uncomfortable, many managers put off giving frank feedback. They know that feedback can improve their team’s performance, but fear that if taken the wrong way, triggering a fight or flight response, it will have the opposite effect and reduce performance.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple tool you could use to overcome these challenges and, as a result, make your team more productive and increase collaboration? Well, Start, Stop, Continue might be just the tool for you.
Start, Stop, Continue is a simple exercise, taking less than twenty minutes, that generates three lists.
Let’s jump in and look at each category in a little more detail.
Your start list contains fresh ideas that you’d like to start doing. These actions should focus on:
Remember to include not just technical actions but also behavioral actions.
Questions you can think about to trigger ideas include:
Ultimately, you want your start list to be a set of fresh ideas to consider trying.
Your stop list contains actions you’re currently doing that need to stop. Stopping these activities will free your team up to do more constructive activities. Actions that need to stop are those that:
Remember to include not just technical actions but also behavioral actions.
Questions to think about to trigger ideas include:
Clearing out the deadwood activities can be like a breath of fresh air for your team. Your team will feel more productive and feel like there is more purpose to their work.
Activities to continue are those that are working well but not yet part of your standard practice.
Commonly, these activities will have been introduced in the previous iteration of the Start, Stop, Continue loop and are working well, but you have not yet embedded them into standard practice.
Questions that can help trigger ideas include:
To perform a Start, Stop, Continue workshop with your team, simply follow the steps below, acting as the meeting facilitator.
The model works best when you repeat it at regular intervals, for example, every week or month. That way, you continuously improve over time.
When you hold these meetings regularly, they should take less than 20 minutes to complete.
There are many ways you can use Start, Stop, Continue. We’ll look at three:
Start, Stop, Continue is often used in agile retrospectives, which are regular postmortems held by agile teams to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and why. They are usually held at the end of each agile sprint or cycle.
The output from an agile retrospective for a single sprint might look like this.
Imagine that you want to lose weight gradually over time in a healthy way. Rather than go on a crash diet, you decide to use the Start, Stop, Continue model each week to help you make regular improvements to your food and exercise choices over time.
The output from a single week’s Start, Stop, Continue session might look like this.
Imagine you are managing a team and you want to create the best office working experience for your team in the city. You use Start, Stop, Continue with your team monthly to improve their office experience.
The output from a single months’ Start, Stop, Continue session might look like this.
If you’d like to perform your own Start, Stop, Continue exercise, you can download our Start, Stop, Continue Template here.
There are several advantages and disadvantages associated with Start, Stop, Continue.
Start, Stop, Continue is a simple feedback tool that can help you continually improve over time that works at both an individual and team level.
Although the tool is straightforward, it can lead to meaningful improvement over the long term.
Bloom’s Taxonomy Explained with Example
The Pygmalion Effect Explained
Train-the-Trainer Model Explained
Kolb’s Learning Cycle
Theory of Planned Behavior
Charette Procedure
Theories of Motivation
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs