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Friday, October 19, 2018
How to Get the Most Out of a Post Mortem in Theatre
blog.propared.com: What's the purpose of a post mortem? One often-cited reason is to discuss with your team what went well and what didn't so we can have a better process next time.
15 comments:
Sidney R.
said...
In my high school I often wondered why the same issues arose year after year in my theatre department. As I was wrapping up my senior year, one of the newer staff members mentioned to me that I should consider post-mortems. At that moment I almost wished I could run back to Freshman year and tell the directors: please, let’s make the process better! I see extreme value in reflecting on the successes and failures of a production to ensure growth in the future. The article emphasizes how to find worth in these meetings even if the production team will be different every time (unlike high school). Focusing on one’s own growth is essential because it will carry over into every future production. I also love the point about perspective shifts and understanding why a decision was made in the first place. This could ease grudges held by a lack of consideration by eliminating emotion which “will set you up well for some good solid closure.”
No matter how many times I’ve requested or recommended a post-mortem for a show, I’ve never actually been in one. I think everyone agrees that it can be a useful tool for growth, both for companies and individuals. But I also think the willingness to do a post-mortem is a metric of openness to self-reflection and growth, as laid out in this article. As a student, I actively seek out feedback and criticism, but I don’t think that ideology is ubiquitous in the profession. It’s common and easy to let things slide. On the other hand, from reading this article (and having sat through too many meetings that were unnecessary, too long, or both), I can see why people might avoid post-mortems. I would imagine that they can be full of feelings and finger-pointing, which doesn’t help anyone. In order for them to be fully successful, I think they would have to be lead by someone who is well-versed and adept in managing those sorts of discussions.
At Colorado Shakes last summer, we didn't have any post mortems. That was partially because the production manager, who would typically be conducting the meetings, was leaving the company, and partially because post mortems had devolved into a bitchfest for everyone involved. Post mortems have a tendency to become less about the process and more about the people. I know that if I had had my post mortem at CSF, the majority of the things I would have had to say would have been about the people that I worked with, rather than the process itself. I think this makes sense, given that I have only worked there for one summer, so my entire frame of reference for the process of CSF is the people that I worked with. Regardless, that is not entirely beneficial for anything other than hiring, since CSF cannot really benefit from me saying "I really hate how this one person did this one thing." All that being said, I think this article is useful in making a post mortem productive instead of bitchy.
I have never gotten the chance to participate in a post mortem. Which, now that I think about it, is probably a bad thing. Post mortems allow for all those to reflect on the process now that there is time to take some steps back from the show and view it more objectively. I can understand Claire's point of these meetings becoming complaining sessions instead of a means of growing as a theatre, so I think the person running the meeting needs to be able to wrangled the participants in order to make the conversation a productive one. I agree with this article's hints. The one I found most helpful is the identifying actionable takeaways. If post mortems are held as a means to improve oneself, then it is smart to leave the meeting with concrete actions that you can take to make yourself better. Hopefully I'll be in a post mortem someday.
The post mortem. In my experience these have consisted of short surface based conversations with your department and then some of the longest most tedious meetings i've have ever been in. Then again I’m thankful they were a part of my high school’s process (much of their philosophy was “jump in the deep end” tactics so some of the production team each time had no idea what they were doing). The main issue in the meetings were because some of these tips were followed a little to judiciously and some totally ignored. The “hear from everyone” sentiment is pure at heart but deathly boring and unhelpful in practice. We started by each department sharing something that went well and something they are going to change next time, but there was little conversation in this section and it was highly regulated to personal reflection, again great in theory but when the sound designers are hashing out how they created a system to label things effectively and the costume designers are half asleep in their chairs, you start to wonder if this really is helping the program. The second and best part of the post mortem was when we had “open forem” time to say what really matters and this is where we were able to focus on specifics (Rehearsal reports need follow ups people) but often we were trying so hard to stick to a time frame (a long one at that) we never got to everyones thoughts. Improving post mortems by focusing on specific topics sounds great, but I still firmly believe some “open forem” can help theatre students reflect and grow as a team. The most important part of this process was in one of our first emails from each show which was the post mortem notes from the corresponding show the year before, we had to reflect and go into the process knowing what was expected and how to avoid last year's mistakes.
Post Mortem's are one of the best things I have encountered, but truthfully only just began to encounter this past summer. As the article mentions, it can be very helpful to track your own progress as a theatre practitioner, even if you are not working with the same team from show to show. However, I do think that there are ways to have meaningful Post Mortems within the same company and within a shorter period of time. For instance, we held a post mortem after every show, just among the 5 members of the stage management team, to reflect back on the challenges we faced, the areas in which we felt we excelled, and what worked or what didn't along the way. It was very helpful to have this every two-week check in, as it truly felt that the purpose of the post mortem was being utilized in the most useful way. Additionally, we then had an end of season post mortem, in which we individually met with production management to have exit interviews. When these rolled around, none of what was said was a surprise because we had taken the time to do bi-weekly check-ins, and it turned out to just be a nice way to reflect on the growth and progress we had witnessed over the course of the past 13 weeks in a very lovely, big-picture type of way. I think Post Mortems are absolutely wonderful if your theatre is committed towards bettering themselves and continuing the growth of their employees. I also think that the advice this writer gives is very useful, with the only exception possibly being that you question why people did or thought the way they did. I worry that this can come across the wrong way, depending on how you do it. It is wonderful to get another person's point of view, and truly listen to what they perceived as having happened, so that you can improve upon your own responses in situations. Additionally, I think that by shortening the meetings, or by having more frequent check-ins, it will be easier to create actionable takeaways that will improve your company's, and your own, approach to the next project.
Personally I am a big fan of post morteums. I have had the opportunity to participate in many in my limited theatre experience and as long as they are handled appropriately they can be quite beneficial, not just to the production, especially if it has a life beyond that production, but to the organization and the individuals who have participated in that production. A post morteum is a great way to problem solve to recognize trends and struggles and to identify ways and areas in which improvements can be made. I think it’s important to recognize the need for constructive criticism and approach to these meetings with understanding and openess rather the searching for who the blame falls on as that will never help change anyone’s methods or cause production discussion. I also think that post morteums are a great way for those in leaderships to show their dedication to continually improving and hearing their employees.
I'm not sure I agree with this article's premise that people avoid post-mortems because they're not working with the same group of people as they were before. While that may be true for designers, or production staff working on Broadway shows, the large majority of theatre happens at regional theatres, which have a resident staff of texhnicians who, on the whole, are working with each other year after year. Post-midterms in that working environment I think can be extremely valuable if, as the author of this article suggests, the team involved can keep the post-morgen short and to the point. I don't think structuring it like a regular meeting with casua discussion is really a good answer to what the team is trying to get out of the meeting. Perhaps something like the dot method can be used to determine the topic of conversation.with the dot method, every team member brings three ideas for topics and writes them down on a card, then the cards are shuffled, and everybody looks at the pile of cards and votes on 5 of them by writing a dot on the card. The cards are then tallied and the topics determined. While not perfect, I think this method could help expedite the process.
The idea of a post-mortem is something that comes up a lot in our educational setting. We often have post-mortems with our advisors about our performance on a project and what we can do better next time. But this process is really different from a traditional post-mortem, which is usually with a whole team and more about process than individual performance. In our production management classes we often talk about why/how post mortems in theatre need to be different. Often the same reasons cited in the article are talked about in our classes, the likelihood of a process to be repeated, the ever-changing team. It’s interesting to see that the kinds of post-mortems this article claims are useful are more similar to what we do in an academic environment. I think the idea of a post-mortem is useful, and companies should endeavor to have one whenever possible. I also think here at CMU it might be useful to schedule production post-mortems, not just individual ones.
I think this article did a great, and concise, job of detailing why post-mortems are an important part of the theatrical process and how to make them as effective as possible. I really wish we did more traditional post-mortems here at CMU, because I think we could really benefit by looking back on the process as a team to figure out what went wrong, where it went wrong, and how to avoid that in the future, as well as what went right and how we can use those successes in future productions as well. I think post-mortems are useful for all areas, from design to production, because it allows people to think back on the process and helps prevent similar missteps in the future that could be avoided. I do appreciate that this article emphasized keeping these meetings short and to the point, and focused on I statements, which I think are the two areas post-mortems typically run into problems.
How to review the working process of any kind of project is so vital that projects should not be seemed finished without doing it. The article provided several tips about how to get more results from doing a post-mortems. Also article specifically indicated that even you're not going to have the same process or same staff members in the future, it is still beneficial to work on a post-mortems. I found two of the tips work for me the best, "focus on yourself" and "shorten your meetings". I didn't realize how important it is to focus on one's self after working on a series of collaborations. The more you prepared yourself and more you correct from the past mistakes makes you a better colleague in many ways. No one wants to work with a person never learned how to cooperate with others. For the tip "shorten your meeting", it is a personal experience to me that meetings tended to drag too long and people lost the center mass of the discussions. I am glad that this idea is brought up in the article.
I figured that this one would have a lot of comments. I think a post-mortem is the most important part of a process especially when there is a lot of staffing turn over or when there s new leadership. The best post-mortem I have ever had was this past summer. The theater had gone though a lot of staffing changes and was getting a new artistic director, so we had a large postmortem with all the dept. heads and their assistants. There was a working agenda but mostly we just went around and talked about things that needed to be improved for our own departments and then for the company in general. It was nearly two hours long and everyone said great things and even though the summer had been very stressful it was useful because the people in power just listened and asked some questions. I am usually a fan of a short meeting but for the most part I felt like every minute of this meeting was used effectively. These discussions are a huge part of when makes theatrical companies successful and I hope that everywhere I work has them in place.
After reading this article, I immediately want to text my high school director and TD to say “this is a thing we should be doing”. Our high school system was that the director and TD would be critiquing all through rehearsal and tech but as soon as the shows started they would go extremely hands-off and avoid giving feedback other than “good job”. Once the show closed and strike finished, we never really discussed it again. I feel like a post-closing discussion of the show process about what worked and what didn’t would be very valuable for everyone involved. I had never heard of a post mortem or been a part of one before reading this but the article made some great arguments in their favor- not just identifying what worked and what didn’t, but being able to hear different perspectives on the show and figure out ways to do better next time.
Post mortems are definitely something that I think would be beneficial here at CMU, as I think right now people don't always get closure or positive takeaways after the show ends. The only post mortems I've had have been with my show adviser one on one, but I think including people from all departments would be very productive. Some of my favorite points from this article are "identify actionable takeaways" and "shorten your meetings". I think that a common problem faced after a post mortem is that everyone one talks about something but then nothing happens. Focusing the meeting on creating action items that will actually make valuable change is a great way to make sure that these meetings stay productive. Shortening meetings and keeping them able a smaller scope of topics can also help to create action items, as this is keeps the meeting centered around one of two ideas.
15 comments:
In my high school I often wondered why the same issues arose year after year in my theatre department. As I was wrapping up my senior year, one of the newer staff members mentioned to me that I should consider post-mortems. At that moment I almost wished I could run back to Freshman year and tell the directors: please, let’s make the process better! I see extreme value in reflecting on the successes and failures of a production to ensure growth in the future. The article emphasizes how to find worth in these meetings even if the production team will be different every time (unlike high school). Focusing on one’s own growth is essential because it will carry over into every future production. I also love the point about perspective shifts and understanding why a decision was made in the first place. This could ease grudges held by a lack of consideration by eliminating emotion which “will set you up well for some good solid closure.”
No matter how many times I’ve requested or recommended a post-mortem for a show, I’ve never actually been in one. I think everyone agrees that it can be a useful tool for growth, both for companies and individuals. But I also think the willingness to do a post-mortem is a metric of openness to self-reflection and growth, as laid out in this article. As a student, I actively seek out feedback and criticism, but I don’t think that ideology is ubiquitous in the profession. It’s common and easy to let things slide.
On the other hand, from reading this article (and having sat through too many meetings that were unnecessary, too long, or both), I can see why people might avoid post-mortems. I would imagine that they can be full of feelings and finger-pointing, which doesn’t help anyone. In order for them to be fully successful, I think they would have to be lead by someone who is well-versed and adept in managing those sorts of discussions.
At Colorado Shakes last summer, we didn't have any post mortems. That was partially because the production manager, who would typically be conducting the meetings, was leaving the company, and partially because post mortems had devolved into a bitchfest for everyone involved. Post mortems have a tendency to become less about the process and more about the people. I know that if I had had my post mortem at CSF, the majority of the things I would have had to say would have been about the people that I worked with, rather than the process itself. I think this makes sense, given that I have only worked there for one summer, so my entire frame of reference for the process of CSF is the people that I worked with. Regardless, that is not entirely beneficial for anything other than hiring, since CSF cannot really benefit from me saying "I really hate how this one person did this one thing." All that being said, I think this article is useful in making a post mortem productive instead of bitchy.
I have never gotten the chance to participate in a post mortem. Which, now that I think about it, is probably a bad thing. Post mortems allow for all those to reflect on the process now that there is time to take some steps back from the show and view it more objectively. I can understand Claire's point of these meetings becoming complaining sessions instead of a means of growing as a theatre, so I think the person running the meeting needs to be able to wrangled the participants in order to make the conversation a productive one. I agree with this article's hints. The one I found most helpful is the identifying actionable takeaways. If post mortems are held as a means to improve oneself, then it is smart to leave the meeting with concrete actions that you can take to make yourself better. Hopefully I'll be in a post mortem someday.
The post mortem. In my experience these have consisted of short surface based conversations with your department and then some of the longest most tedious meetings i've have ever been in. Then again I’m thankful they were a part of my high school’s process (much of their philosophy was “jump in the deep end” tactics so some of the production team each time had no idea what they were doing). The main issue in the meetings were because some of these tips were followed a little to judiciously and some totally ignored. The “hear from everyone” sentiment is pure at heart but deathly boring and unhelpful in practice. We started by each department sharing something that went well and something they are going to change next time, but there was little conversation in this section and it was highly regulated to personal reflection, again great in theory but when the sound designers are hashing out how they created a system to label things effectively and the costume designers are half asleep in their chairs, you start to wonder if this really is helping the program. The second and best part of the post mortem was when we had “open forem” time to say what really matters and this is where we were able to focus on specifics (Rehearsal reports need follow ups people) but often we were trying so hard to stick to a time frame (a long one at that) we never got to everyones thoughts. Improving post mortems by focusing on specific topics sounds great, but I still firmly believe some “open forem” can help theatre students reflect and grow as a team. The most important part of this process was in one of our first emails from each show which was the post mortem notes from the corresponding show the year before, we had to reflect and go into the process knowing what was expected and how to avoid last year's mistakes.
Post Mortem's are one of the best things I have encountered, but truthfully only just began to encounter this past summer. As the article mentions, it can be very helpful to track your own progress as a theatre practitioner, even if you are not working with the same team from show to show. However, I do think that there are ways to have meaningful Post Mortems within the same company and within a shorter period of time. For instance, we held a post mortem after every show, just among the 5 members of the stage management team, to reflect back on the challenges we faced, the areas in which we felt we excelled, and what worked or what didn't along the way. It was very helpful to have this every two-week check in, as it truly felt that the purpose of the post mortem was being utilized in the most useful way. Additionally, we then had an end of season post mortem, in which we individually met with production management to have exit interviews. When these rolled around, none of what was said was a surprise because we had taken the time to do bi-weekly check-ins, and it turned out to just be a nice way to reflect on the growth and progress we had witnessed over the course of the past 13 weeks in a very lovely, big-picture type of way. I think Post Mortems are absolutely wonderful if your theatre is committed towards bettering themselves and continuing the growth of their employees. I also think that the advice this writer gives is very useful, with the only exception possibly being that you question why people did or thought the way they did. I worry that this can come across the wrong way, depending on how you do it. It is wonderful to get another person's point of view, and truly listen to what they perceived as having happened, so that you can improve upon your own responses in situations. Additionally, I think that by shortening the meetings, or by having more frequent check-ins, it will be easier to create actionable takeaways that will improve your company's, and your own, approach to the next project.
Personally I am a big fan of post morteums. I have had the opportunity to participate in many in my limited theatre experience and as long as they are handled appropriately they can be quite beneficial, not just to the production, especially if it has a life beyond that production, but to the organization and the individuals who have participated in that production. A post morteum is a great way to problem solve to recognize trends and struggles and to identify ways and areas in which improvements can be made. I think it’s important to recognize the need for constructive criticism and approach to these meetings with understanding and openess rather the searching for who the blame falls on as that will never help change anyone’s methods or cause production discussion. I also think that post morteums are a great way for those in leaderships to show their dedication to continually improving and hearing their employees.
I'm not sure I agree with this article's premise that people avoid post-mortems because they're not working with the same group of people as they were before. While that may be true for designers, or production staff working on Broadway shows, the large majority of theatre happens at regional theatres, which have a resident staff of texhnicians who, on the whole, are working with each other year after year. Post-midterms in that working environment I think can be extremely valuable if, as the author of this article suggests, the team involved can keep the post-morgen short and to the point. I don't think structuring it like a regular meeting with casua discussion is really a good answer to what the team is trying to get out of the meeting. Perhaps something like the dot method can be used to determine the topic of conversation.with the dot method, every team member brings three ideas for topics and writes them down on a card, then the cards are shuffled, and everybody looks at the pile of cards and votes on 5 of them by writing a dot on the card. The cards are then tallied and the topics determined. While not perfect, I think this method could help expedite the process.
The idea of a post-mortem is something that comes up a lot in our educational setting. We often have post-mortems with our advisors about our performance on a project and what we can do better next time. But this process is really different from a traditional post-mortem, which is usually with a whole team and more about process than individual performance. In our production management classes we often talk about why/how post mortems in theatre need to be different. Often the same reasons cited in the article are talked about in our classes, the likelihood of a process to be repeated, the ever-changing team. It’s interesting to see that the kinds of post-mortems this article claims are useful are more similar to what we do in an academic environment. I think the idea of a post-mortem is useful, and companies should endeavor to have one whenever possible. I also think here at CMU it might be useful to schedule production post-mortems, not just individual ones.
I think this article did a great, and concise, job of detailing why post-mortems are an important part of the theatrical process and how to make them as effective as possible. I really wish we did more traditional post-mortems here at CMU, because I think we could really benefit by looking back on the process as a team to figure out what went wrong, where it went wrong, and how to avoid that in the future, as well as what went right and how we can use those successes in future productions as well. I think post-mortems are useful for all areas, from design to production, because it allows people to think back on the process and helps prevent similar missteps in the future that could be avoided. I do appreciate that this article emphasized keeping these meetings short and to the point, and focused on I statements, which I think are the two areas post-mortems typically run into problems.
How to review the working process of any kind of project is so vital that projects should not be seemed finished without doing it. The article provided several tips about how to get more results from doing a post-mortems. Also article specifically indicated that even you're not going to have the same process or same staff members in the future, it is still beneficial to work on a post-mortems. I found two of the tips work for me the best, "focus on yourself" and "shorten your meetings". I didn't realize how important it is to focus on one's self after working on a series of collaborations. The more you prepared yourself and more you correct from the past mistakes makes you a better colleague in many ways. No one wants to work with a person never learned how to cooperate with others. For the tip "shorten your meeting", it is a personal experience to me that meetings tended to drag too long and people lost the center mass of the discussions. I am glad that this idea is brought up in the article.
I figured that this one would have a lot of comments. I think a post-mortem is the most important part of a process especially when there is a lot of staffing turn over or when there s new leadership. The best post-mortem I have ever had was this past summer. The theater had gone though a lot of staffing changes and was getting a new artistic director, so we had a large postmortem with all the dept. heads and their assistants. There was a working agenda but mostly we just went around and talked about things that needed to be improved for our own departments and then for the company in general. It was nearly two hours long and everyone said great things and even though the summer had been very stressful it was useful because the people in power just listened and asked some questions. I am usually a fan of a short meeting but for the most part I felt like every minute of this meeting was used effectively. These discussions are a huge part of when makes theatrical companies successful and I hope that everywhere I work has them in place.
After reading this article, I immediately want to text my high school director and TD to say “this is a thing we should be doing”. Our high school system was that the director and TD would be critiquing all through rehearsal and tech but as soon as the shows started they would go extremely hands-off and avoid giving feedback other than “good job”. Once the show closed and strike finished, we never really discussed it again. I feel like a post-closing discussion of the show process about what worked and what didn’t would be very valuable for everyone involved. I had never heard of a post mortem or been a part of one before reading this but the article made some great arguments in their favor- not just identifying what worked and what didn’t, but being able to hear different perspectives on the show and figure out ways to do better next time.
Post mortems are definitely something that I think would be beneficial here at CMU, as I think right now people don't always get closure or positive takeaways after the show ends. The only post mortems I've had have been with my show adviser one on one, but I think including people from all departments would be very productive. Some of my favorite points from this article are "identify actionable takeaways" and "shorten your meetings". I think that a common problem faced after a post mortem is that everyone one talks about something but then nothing happens. Focusing the meeting on creating action items that will actually make valuable change is a great way to make sure that these meetings stay productive. Shortening meetings and keeping them able a smaller scope of topics can also help to create action items, as this is keeps the meeting centered around one of two ideas.
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