Debrief Everything
July 20th, 2009 by Nico LuchsingerLast weekend, I had day-long debriefing meeting with Fabian, and with was, as always, great and energizing.
Fabian and I have known each other for ten years, we have worked together on many projects, but are also very good friends spending a lot of time together.
A couple of years back, we started to «debrief» the projects we were doing: we sat down after the project to carefully evaluate what went well and what went wrong, and then tried to apply these learnings to the next project.
Eventually, we realized that we could also «debrief» our personal lives. So we started meeting about every six months for a full day to talk about what had happened since the last meeting. We have been able to keep this frequence for the last two and a half years, even though Fabian moved to New York a year ago and I stayed in Zurich.
At our debriefings, we talk about the positive and negative events in our lives, about the people that influenced and inspired us, and the topics that were important to us. We state our vision and objectives for the coming months and assess if we have reached our goals in the past period.
To keep things interesting, we also try to switch places several times during a debriefing session – starting out in one café, then hitting another one after a couple of hours and maybe a third one at the end of the day.
Why do we do that? We both lead quite exciting lives with lots of stuff happening. Looking back every once in a while helps us realize just how much has actually happened. It’s also because we’re convinced that consciously looking back helps you get the bigger picture. And because we believe that we have a lot to learn from each other’s experiences. And, well, because we just like to talk a lot 
Nico is Sandbox’ co-founder. He is currently also writing a master thesis in medieval history and a blog on new media for a Swiss newspaper.
