Hopes and fears exercise

Everyone joins a project with a picture of how it could go well and a private list of what could go wrong. This exercise puts both on one board while there is still time to act on them.

Hopes

What you’re excited to achieve together

Fears

Risks or anxieties we should surface and plan for

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What a hopes and fears exercise is

The board has two columns. Under Hopes, people write what they want this team, project or stretch of work to achieve. Under Fears, they write what worries them: risks to delivery, gaps in skills, ways the collaboration could go wrong. The team groups the cards, votes on the ones that matter most and leaves with a few actions that protect the hopes and take the sting out of the biggest fears.

It looks almost too simple. But most kick-offs are slides about scope and dates, and very few ask the people doing the work what they expect and what keeps them up at night. Those expectations exist whether you ask or not. The exercise makes them visible while they are still cheap to deal with.

Why two plain columns do so much:

• Fears are risks in plain language. Nobody writes "single point of failure in the sync service". They write "Only Priya understands the sync service", and that version is far easier to act on.
• Mismatched expectations show up on day one. If the designer hopes for two rounds of user research and the lead hopes to ship in six weeks, it is better to find out now than in week five.
• People learn they are not alone. When four cards name the same deadline, the worry stops being one person's anxiety and becomes a team topic.
• There is no past to defend. The board is about work that has not happened yet, so the conversation is less guarded than in a retro about last sprint. That is why teams often run it as a futurespective: a retrospective held before the work starts.

When to use it, and when not to

The exercise fits any moment when a group is about to start something together:

• a project or product kick-off, ideally in the first week;
• a newly formed team, or two teams merging into one;
• before a big change in how you work: a new stack, a move from Scrum to Kanban, a reorganization;
• after a tough sprint or a failed release, when the team needs to reset expectations for the next stretch rather than relive what went wrong;
• the first hour of a workshop, an offsite or a long engagement with a client, where people arrive with very different expectations.

Pick something else when:

• You need to look back at finished work. There is no column for what happened. For a regular sprint review, What Went Well is the lighter choice.
• The goal is agreed and you want to check your course. The sailboat retrospective puts the goal on the board and separates what slows you down today from the risks ahead.
• You are halfway through and have history to learn from. FLAP pairs lessons and accomplishments so far with the decisions still to make.
• The fear has already come true and nobody says it. A two-column board is too gentle for that. Use Elephant in the Room.

The two columns

Ask for cards in both columns, one idea per card. Fears usually come faster than hopes, so if the board looks lopsided after a few minutes, give the hopes column a minute of its own.

Hopes: what you want to achieve together

Outcomes, ways of working and personal goals the writer would be glad to see come true. The best hopes are specific enough to check later. "A great product" is a mood. "Real users try the beta before we build the second half" is a hope you can hold up against reality in three months.

Personal hopes belong here too. "I want to lead a feature end to end" tells a team lead more than several one-to-ones.

• Ship the Android app to everyone by June, not just the beta group
• Designers and developers work from the same tickets instead of handing off mockups
• We switch off the old admin panel instead of maintaining two
• I get to own a service from design to on-call for the first time

Fears: what could go wrong, and what to plan for

Risks, worries and doubts: about delivery, the technology, how the team will work, or the writer's own place in it. A fear is about something that might happen. If it is already happening, it is a problem; write it anyway, but expect it to need a different kind of conversation.

The test for a good fear card: could someone read it and do something to make it less likely? "Things will go wrong" fails. "We'll discover the partner API's rate limits only after launch" passes.

• The release date was announced before anyone estimated the work
• Only Priya knows the old sync service, and she moves teams in March
• We'll spend two months debating architecture and ship nothing
• I'm new to React Native and worried I'll slow everyone down

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A 45-minute hopes and fears agenda

This plan suits a team of four to ten people. With a bigger group, or with a client in the room, add ten minutes to the discussion.

1. Warm-up, 5 minutes. In a new team, people may barely know each other's names. Pick a question from the get-to-know-you icebreakers, or let the board open with ProstoRetro's icebreaker round, which picks the question and the person who answers.
2. Set the horizon, 3 minutes. Say what you are starting and how far ahead to think: this release, the next quarter, the first three months as a team. Without a horizon, hopes turn into career plans and fears into general unease.
3. Silent writing, 8 minutes. Everyone writes hopes and fears, one per card. Cards stay hidden from others while people write, so the first loud worry does not set the tone for everyone else.
4. Grouping, 6 minutes. Read the cards aloud and merge duplicates. Five cards about the same deadline are one strong signal, not five topics. ProstoRetro can suggest groups, which you keep or undo.
5. Voting, 4 minutes. Everyone puts their votes on the topics they most want to talk about. Votes usually pile onto fears. Make sure at least one hope reaches the discussion as well; it is what the team is trying to protect.
6. Discussion, 14 minutes. For each top fear, ask two questions: what would we notice first if this started happening, and what can we do this week to make it less likely? For the top hope: how will we know in three months that it came true?
7. Actions and agreements, 3 minutes. Some fears become actions with one owner and a due date: "Priya pairs with Tom on the sync service before March". Others become team agreements: "architecture debates get a one-week time-box". Write both down.
8. Close, 2 minutes. Ask each person for one word on how they feel about the project now.

Do not throw the board away. The summary page keeps the cards and the actions, and it is worth reopening at the halfway mark to see which fears came true and which hopes are on track.

Running it with a remote team

• Make it easy for guests to join. A kick-off often includes people from outside the core team: a designer on loan, a contractor, a stakeholder. When the room is open to anyone with the link, they join as guests with just a name, no account.
• Collect cards before the call across time zones. An infinite room in ProstoRetro is a permanent link where people add cards in their own time. The cards stay hidden until the team meets, so nobody reads the others before writing their own.
• Ask the confidence question as a poll. Midway through the discussion, run an anonymous poll: "How confident are you that we hit the June date?" with four options. The spread of answers says more than the polite nods on camera.
• Let the lead speak last. On a call, whoever unmutes first frames the topic, and a manager's first word carries extra weight. Ask them to hold back until others have spoken on each fear.
• Make the actions stick. Give each action an owner and a due date, and ProstoRetro's reminder emails will chase it for you. Whatever is still open comes back for review at the team's next retro.

Variations

Hopes, fears and contributions

Add a third column: What I bring. Each person writes a skill, habit or piece of knowledge they offer the team. It turns a list of worries into a map of who can help with what, and it works especially well in a new team. In ProstoRetro you can build it as a custom template with your own columns, descriptions and colors.

The pre-mortem twist

Ask people to imagine it is six months from now and the project has failed, then write in the Fears column why it failed. The framing gives permission to be blunt: people are not predicting failure, they are explaining one. You get fewer vague worries and more specific causes, which turn into actions more easily.

The checkpoint rerun

Run the exercise again at the midpoint of the project with the same horizon. Put the kick-off summary on the screen first. Fears that have disappeared tell you which actions worked; new fears tell you what the team learned since.

Common mistakes

• Reassuring instead of listening. "That won't happen" closes a fear without dealing with it. Ask what would make it less likely, and write the answer down.
• Hopes too vague to check. "Good collaboration" cannot be revisited. Ask the writer what it would look like on a normal Tuesday.
• Fears with no follow-up. Saying a fear out loud does not make it smaller. A fear that gets airtime but no action or agreement comes back louder in a month.
• Reliving the last project. After a hard sprint, the Fears column can fill with complaints about what already happened. Steer each card towards the future: "what are you afraid will happen again?"
• Turning it into a planning meeting. A fear about the deadline can pull the session into re-estimating the whole project. Capture it as an action, "re-estimate the import work by Thursday", and move on.

FAQ

What is a hopes and fears exercise?

A short team activity, usually at the start of a project, where everyone writes what they hope will happen and what they fear might go wrong. The team then discusses the biggest fears and agrees on actions to prevent them.

How long does a hopes and fears exercise take?

About 45 minutes for a team of up to ten, as in the agenda above. As the opening part of a longer kick-off, a 20-minute version works: write, group, and discuss only the top two fears.

What is the difference between hopes and fears and a pre-mortem?

A pre-mortem looks only at failure and asks why it happened. Hopes and fears also captures what people want, so you learn what the team is aiming for as well as what it is afraid of.

Can I use it as a regular retrospective?

Yes, especially after a difficult sprint, when the team needs to reset expectations before the next one. For routine sprints, rotate with formats that look back at finished work.

Can I run a hopes and fears exercise online for free?

Yes. ProstoRetro has the Hopes & Fears template built in, free of charge, so a kick-off with a contractor or a client in the room needs no extra setup. Read how to run a great retro for a walkthrough of the app, or browse the other retrospective templates.