Notice what worked

Retrospective Capture

Stop letting lessons die in the meeting room.

Runs structured post-event reflection — retro, post-mortem, after-action review — against a consistent template, captures the output with provenance, and lands it in a retrievable knowledge surface. The payoff is downstream: the next team starting similar work pulls the captured lessons before acting, instead of relearning the same things from scratch.

Shape

Operational dimensions

Human co-pilot

Person and system work side-by-side.

On demand

Fires when a user asks.

Low data gravity

Light state; replaceable any time.

Writes outbound

Emits to external systems; does not read them.

Inputs

reflection prompt / template (what happened, expected, gap, change)
event or project under review with provenance (team, date, context)
participating actors and their accounts

Outputs

structured lessons-learned record with provenance
retrievable knowledge entry tagged by domain and context
action items with owner assignments (optional)

Mechanism

Structurally captures human-driven post-event reflection (post-mortem, after-action review, sprint retro, lessons-learned session, project debrief) into a queryable knowledge surface that future work retrieves before acting.

Why this is a primitive

Cannot be decomposed — the elicit-reflection → structure-against-template → persist-into-retrievable-knowledge operation is one mechanism. It is human-driven (a facilitated session or written debrief), template-shaped (what happened / what we expected / why the gap / what we'll change), and oriented at downstream retrieval (the knowledge surface IS the artefact future work touches). Distinct from telemetry (machine-emitted signal) and stated-feedback (forced-choice / rating-scale from end users) — this is structured narrative reflection from the actors who DID the work.

Where it shows up

Engineering team — sprint retrospective structured against a standard what-went-well / what-didn't / what-we'll-change template, persisted into a searchable retro archive

Incident response — post-mortem after a production outage captured against a five-whys template, landing in a runbook knowledge base the on-call team queries before the next incident

Consulting firm — project debrief after each client engagement capturing delivery lessons, retrievable by engagement type for pre-sales scoping on similar future work

School leadership — end-of-term after-action review on a new curriculum rollout, structured against expected vs actual outcomes, feeding the next planning cycle

Related primitives

Composes with

Telemetry-Driven Refinement Loop →Controlled Experimentation →Stated-Feedback Capture →

Alternative to

Telemetry-Driven Refinement Loop →