How to Implement Rose, Bud, Thorn Method |

Ever finished a big project, given a great presentation, or hit a new milestone, and then just moved on without thinking twice? It’s easy to skip the step that actually helps you grow: reflection.

Reflection isn’t overthinking. It’s about taking a moment to look at what went well, what didn’t, and what could happen next.

That’s where the Rose, Bud, and Thorn exercise comes in. It’s a quick and easy way to reflect on your day, a project, or even your personal goals. Whether you’re looking back on a win or a tough moment, this simple tool can help you make sense of it—and move forward with clarity.

What is the Rose, Bud, and Thorn Exercise?

The Rose, Bud, and Thorn is a mindful, reflective activity. It prompts individuals to ponder over the different aspects of a situation or period and come up with three takeaways—Rose, Bud, and Thorns. These metaphors depict:

• Rose (Positives): Recognize a specifically positive highlight of the experience, situation, or timeframe. It could be things that worked in your favor, noteworthy or exceptional achievements, something you’re grateful for, a particularly enjoyable memory, etc.
• Bud (Opportunities): Moving forward, identify opportunities for further growth and development in the near future. It could be a new skill that you wish to acquire, a facet where you see room for improvement, a tool that can make your life easier, a market gap that your company could seek to fill, etc.
• Thorn (Challenges): Acknowledge the challenges or obstacles you’ve encountered or may face in the scenario. This could be a specific difficulty that you faced, something that added to your struggles, a problem that needs to be addressed, etc.

Think of it as a lessons-learned template that adds structure to reflective activities for personal or professional growth.

How to Implement the Rose, Bud, and Thorn Methodology?

Here’s a step-by-step guide for implementing the Rose, Bud, and Thorn ideology—at work, schools, or at home:

Step 1: Prepare

Start by finding a quiet space where you can focus and brainstorm freely and without any interruptions. Once you’re comfortably settled, decide on the scope of the exercise. For example, if you’re looking to review a project at work, consider whether you wish to reflect on the project idea in its entirety or pinpoint a specific project phase.

Next, collect all the relevant documentation or inputs, such as notes, scope documents, meeting minutes, project assessment templates, etc. Finally, gather all the material you’ll require for the reflection—this could be your journal, a whiteboard, sticky notes, or even a project management tool like .

Step 2: Reflect

Now’s when you dive into the reflection part of the exercise. Draw a table with three columns—Rose, Bud, and Thorns.

Any positive element of the project or project phase will go into the ‘Roses’ section. This includes:

• Successes achieved: High-quality deliverables, meeting project milestones, project cost savings, etc.
• Positive team dynamics: Efficient communication, excellent teamwork and collaboration, supportive work environment, etc.
• Client satisfaction: Positive feedback, referral to another client, new project from the same client, etc.
• Personal achievements: Your role in the project’s success, specific skills that came in handy, etc.

Then, shift your focus to the future to identify the ‘Buds.’ A bud is a potential rose. To discover these, identify areas where growth and improvement are practically possible. This could involve:

• Lessons learned: Milestones that could have been met earlier, potential cost savings, quality enhancement in deliverables, effective team performance, etc.
• Skills to develop: Talent gaps that you can fill to improve project outcomes, skills that can be refined, mission-critical skills that are currently missing, etc.
• Areas of customer engagement: How to encourage customer participation and involvement, how to respond to customer feedback, smarter communication channels, etc.
• Process improvements: Scope for automating some activities, developing a critical path, streamlining operational or business workflows, generating new business, better ways to execute an etc.

Finally, you fill out the ‘Thorns’—the challenges or obstacles that cropped up during the project or project phase and gave you a hard time. These could be:

• Difficulties faced: Technical issues, unexpected constraints or roadblocks, communication breakdowns, etc.
• Client challenges: Client disengagement or dissatisfaction, negative feedback, unfulfilled expectations, etc.
• Team issues: Poor accountability or task ownership, communication gaps, role conflicts, improper delegation, overutilization of resources, etc.

Do note that you don’t necessarily have to go in the Rose > Buds > Thorns order. You can simply reflect on the experience and classify incidents across these three parameters.

Step 3: Plan

Performing this exercise would be in vain if it doesn’t translate to actionable planning. 

Start by analyzing your Rose, Buds, and Thorns table. Look for patterns or connections between the three elements. Alternatively, you may brainstorm solutions and develop specific action steps for capitalizing on the roses, nurturing the buds, and snipping off the thorns. The objective is to play to your strengths, address any problems, and keep improving!

Step 4: Document

Since growth and development is an ongoing process,  document everything— the Rose, Buds, Thorns table, deliberations, insights, takeaways, project-based learnings, new ideas, and plans. Such documentation can be a valuable tool for future reference and benchmarking progress.

Let’s find out how you can do all of these and more with .

How to Practice Rose, Bud, and Thorn Reflection with

Practicing the Rose, Bud, and Thorn reflection method is a powerful way to gain insights into your projects or daily work. With , this process becomes even more effective and actionable. Whether you’re using it for personal or professional use, the following features can facilitate this self-reflective exercise:

Brain

’s AI-powered features, like Brain, can help you quickly identify what’s working well (Roses), spot new opportunities (Buds), and highlight challenges (Thorns) directly from your notes, tasks, or meeting summaries. This not only streamlines your reflection process but also ensures you never miss important details, making continuous improvement a natural part of your workflow.

Check out this video to know more about Brain👇

Brain is more than an AI assistant. It is a neural network that connects tasks, docs, people, and all of your company’s knowledge base to make it more accessible, navigable, and searchable. Such detailed transparency into the organization’s digital space makes Brain highly efficient in conducting in-depth analysis.

Here’s a sample of Brain performing the analysis for you 👇

Docs

Documentation is a critical step in implementing the Rose, Bud, and Thorn technique. You’ll need a tool to create, edit, and share documents. Enter Docs.

Docs is a one-stop repository for all your documents. Use it to craft detailed documents that analyze your roses, buds, and thorns. Describe each accomplishment, setback, factors that contributed to it, how it could have been improved, and more. You can unpack insights in granular details—not just on your own but even as a team. Celebrate success, brainstorm solutions, and highlight risks, all on Docs.

Custom Views

Use ’s Kanban View to create a custom board. Divide this Board into three columns— Roses, Buds, and Thorns. Move tasks between these columns to group and categorize outcomes. Roses would be the tasks that were a success, Buds correspond to tasks with room for improvement, and Thorns are the tasks that backfired or failed to take off. 

Alternatively, if you’re looking to track progress while also classifying tasks as roses, buds, and thorns, then you can choose ’s Gantt Chart View. It offers a bird’s eye view of the project. Staying focused on the big picture makes it easier to track dependencies, manage priorities, and collaborate across a visual timeline. As for whether a task is a rose, bud, or thorn, you can use the tagging feature to elaborate on this detail.

Chat

Chat allows you or your team to quickly share Roses, Buds, and Thorns in real time, making reflection collaborative and immediate. You can gather feedback, discuss observations, and keep all insights organized in one place for easy reference. This streamlines team communication and ensures everyone’s voice is heard during the reflection process.

Goals 

Goals are designed to help you achieve measurable success faster. Setting timelines, defining success metrics, assigning priorities, and tracking progress automatically lays a solid foundation for a goal-focused Rose, Bud, Thorn analysis. 

Whiteboards

Whiteboards are effective tools for collective brainstorming. Think of them as a visual counterpart of Docs. Start by using them for team-based reflections and identify the roses, buds, and thorns during a project or its phase. Then work together to identify possible solutions to the problems identified. Whiteboards makes it easy to translate your team’s ideas into tasks, workflows, Docs, and more. Having everything in one platform minimizes the possibility of any drop-offs or integration issues.

Templates

Let’s talk about the templates available on .

has a rich library of templates for different use cases, industries, projects, etc. They are 100% customizable and save you time by offering you a prebuilt structure for your reflection exercise.

Some templates that you can use for Rose, Bud, Thorn exercise include:

• Project Retrospective: This beginner-friendly template allows you to evaluate whether a project or a phase was a hit or a miss. It also enables you to explore what could be done differently to get positive outcomes and prevent failures. Such retrospection empowers you to review team performance against set goals and objectives and make smarter decisions in future projects

• Sprint Retrospective Brainstorm: This template analyzes a project to lend clarity on what went right, what could be done better, and what bombed. While it is tailored for running sprints during agile development, you can use it for various projects. Analyze the progress of your sprints, brainstorm ideas or solutions to improve sprint outcomes, reflect on the highs, lows, and could-have-been of every sprint, and identify trends and patterns over multiple sprints with this template

• Corrective Action Plan: Simply reflecting on projects is not enough. You need to fix any mistakes and steer the project back on track. Here’s where this beginner-level template comes in handy. It organizes and illustrates all your data to display gaps in processes and policies and identify possible root causes of issues to help you develop a comprehensive corrective action plan

Significance of the Rose, Bud, and Thorn Exercise

Whether you use it for personal reflection or project evaluation, the Rose, Bud, and Thorn exercise offers the following benefits:

• A balanced perspective: It helps you break out from black-and-white thinking and offers you a more balanced and realistic perspective. Rather than obsessing over how great or terrible everything was, you reflect on the positive and negative elements
• Mindful self-awareness: It promotes mindfulness by encouraging individuals to actively reflect on their experiences. The neutral perspective will drive self-awareness, while the balanced and objective nature of the exercise will unlock insights into strengths, challenges, and areas of improvement
• Smarter decision-making: Focusing on the roses (positives) helps identify what’s working for you. At the same time, the analysis of thorns (challenges) highlights any gaps. When observed in the context of buds (opportunities), you may follow a problem-solving approach to make smarter decisions to get better results
• Collaborative action: Performing this exercise in groups promotes the exchange of ideas, perspectives, and experiences. In addition to the individual roses, thorns, and buds, teams can identify these elements at a team level to facilitate smoother collaboration, harness individual strengths, offset weaknesses, and strengthen communication
• Effective goal setting: Noticing the roses, buds, and thorns helps set or recalibrate goals. Whether it is personal or professional growth and development, this exercise drives motivation, sharpens focus, and fosters iterative growth to achieve goals more effectively. It fuels long-term and short-term goal planning so that you can develop as an individual and as a team
• Gratitude and acceptance: It’s easy to go over game tapes when you’ve registered success. But that’s not the case if you fail. This exercise acknowledges both positive and negative components, regardless of the outcome, to cultivate healthy self-perception, kindle compassion, and develop an appreciation of things that did go right

Who Should Use the Rose, Bud, and Thorn Technique?

Given the versatile nature of the Rose, Bud, and Thorn technique, virtually anyone can use it as a tool to gain a deep understanding of themselves and their experiences. Such self-reflection catalyzes growth and development.

That said, here’s a breakdown of certain segments who will find it particularly valuable:

Individuals

At an individual level, you can use the Rose, Bud, Thorn exercise for personal reflection. Here are a few examples of this:

• Processing experiences and learning from them
• Embarking on self-development journeys
• Gaining self-awareness and resilience

Teams

The Rose, Bud, and Thorn exercise is a great tool for team building as it helps with:

• Developing a shared understanding of each others’ experiences and perspectives
• Encouraging open communication and responding with empathy
• Leveraging individual strengths to amplify team performance
• Brainstorming ideas for collaborative problem-solving

Managers

Leaders and managers may use the Rose, Bud, and Thorn technique for:

• Reviewing the performance of a team or individuals
• Identifying learning opportunities or skill development requirements
• Reflecting on wins, misses, and areas of improvement to better manage client projects

The Rose, Bud, and Thorn Thinking Exercise Through Examples

Let’s look at some examples of the Rose, Bud, Thorn technique to explain the concept further. We’re covering personal and professional situations to help you visualize the different applications.

Example 1: Personal analysis

Scenario: You’ve committed to a new morning workout. Tomorrow will be 30 days since you’ve been practicing it diligently. You want to celebrate by reflecting on your progress using the Rose, Bud, and Thorn exercise.

Using our step-by-step guide, you get the following table:

Rose	Bud	Thorn
You’ve developed a consistent habit of waking up early in the morning	You could add more structure to your workout routine to target specific muscle groups every day	You sometimes struggle with getting out of bed early for your workout
You notice an increase in your energy and stamina levels	You wish to explore cardio and body-weight exercises to add variety	There have been days when you’ve pushed yourself too hard and been tired throughout the day
You see an improvement in your strength, flexibility, and mobility	You want to be mindful of your eating habits and adopt a healthy diet to support your fitness goals	You are yet to see the results that you wished to achieve with this workout routine

Example 2: Professional analysis

Scenario: Your company recently launched a new product, and you’re the marketing manager who orchestrated the campaign. After the first date of the product’s soft launch, you’re excited to meet your team to review performance and roadmap for the next phase.

In this case, the Rose, Bud, Thorn template would look something like this:

Rose	Bud	Thorn
The website saw a lot of traffic after the campaign launch	There’s room to increase outreach by collaborating with relevant influencers	The unexpected traffic influx caused the website to crash momentarily
Social media engagement has been exceptionally high, with above-average impressions, likes, shares, and comments	Analyze metrics and behavior on the product’s landing page to identify areas of improvement	Some customers marked the promotional emails and newsletters as spam, highlighting poor targeting
20% of the target audience has preordered the product and 60% of the remaining display strong signs of intent to purchase	Collect feedback from clients who have placed preorders to gain insights into their purchase experience	A competitor launched a similar product after a few days, causing the interest in your product to fizzle out

Practical Applications of Rose, Bud, and Thorn: Various Use Cases

We’ve consistently mentioned how the Rose, Bud, Thorn exercise is a versatile tool for various applications—personal and professional. To prove this point, here is a list of some of the common use cases across industries, business value chains, and personal growth where you can apply Rose, Bud, and Thorn’s reflective thinking:

Project-based learnings

The Rose, Bud, and Thorn technique is a valuable tool during project initiation. By reflecting on past projects and associated experiences, teams can effectively plan project roadmaps, proactively address potential challenges, and deliver successful results.

Here are a few examples of some ways to use the Rose, Bud, and Thorn thinking:

• Reflecting on thorns from previous projects of a similar nature to proactively identify potential roadblocks, issues, and constraints in the early stages of a new project
• Reviewing roses and buds from past projects and using them as a reference to set achievable goals against realistic timelines for an upcoming project
• Identifying thorns in teamwork, collaboration, and communication and working on these to bring together a cohesive unit that operates like a well-oiled machine

Web design and development

The Rose, Bud, and Thorn assessment caters to the web design and development project’s requirement of continuous improvement and continuous deployment. Here’s how you can use it to refine design thinking while working on web design project management:

• Translating user testing insights into actionable strategies to improve website layout during the design phase
• Leveraging user feedback to iterate on project design, color palette, layout, etc. and make it user-centric
• Reflecting on past web development project management experience and identifying ways to improve it

Sales and marketing

Sales and marketing teams leverage the Rose, Bud, and Thorn techniques to refine strategies and optimize campaigns. By reflecting on past successes and challenges, they can craft campaigns that maximize revenue.

Here are some ways to do so:

• Analyzing areas of underperformance to optimize campaigns, budget utilization, and resource allocation
• Reflecting on upselling and cross-selling opportunities from previous sales efforts
• Evaluating customer feedback to improve customer support and service throughout the sales cycle

Informed decision-making

The Rose, Bud and Thorn technique doubles as a decision-making tool. By reflecting on past experiences, you can weigh out your options and forecast potential outcomes. Such informed decision-making helps make choices that align with your goals and values.

Here’s how you can apply it:

• Identifying decisions that led to roses (positive outcomes) and repeating them for similar situations for proven success
• Analyzing situations from different perspectives to identify favorable consequences and potential for maximum growth
• Identifying risks or threats associated with different decisions and developing contingency and risk mitigation plans to offset their effects

Education and capacity building

Educators and trainers can use the Rose, Bud, and Thorn strategy to improve their teaching methodologies and learning materials. They can reflect on their classroom sessions to identify areas where students thrived, obstacles students faced, and aspects that can be improved. This improves learning outcomes since you use it for:

• Personalizing the students’ learning objectives and experience after the Rose, Bud, and Thorn analysis
• Identifying areas of improvement in training or educational content and updating them to align with key learning objectives
• Improving assessment tools by iterative development of evaluation methodologies to test learning outcomes

Healthcare

Healthcare professionals can utilize the Rose, Bud, and Thorn technique to improve patient care. From identifying treatments that worked to staying wary of the challenges faced during recovery, the Rose, Bud, and Thorns exercise is improving healthcare by:

• Reflecting on the patient’s medical requirements and existing or anticipated health complications to develop personalized treatment plans and supplemental care
• Improving patient communication to develop a shared understanding and address any concerns or worries related to the treatment
• Discovering opportunities for preventive care or alternative treatments to promote overall well-being

Acquiring a new skill

Committing to acquiring a new skill is daunting. However, with the Rose, Bud, and Thorn technique, you can self-reflect on this ongoing process. Dissecting your experience across strengths, challenges, and growth opportunities allows you to chart your journey and stay motivated.

Here are some ways to apply this:

• Reflecting on your learning journey and celebrating your own rose or milestone along the way
• Uncovering opportunities to refine the skill and improve the learning experience through allied courses or resources
• Employing problem-solving skills to address challenges that prevent you from staying committed to the learning process

Relationship building

Whether you’re looking at business or personal relationships, the Rose, Bud, and Thorn technique helps you improve them both. By combining self-reflection and intentional communication, you can cultivate deeper connections that improve social-emotional health. Here are some ways you can use it:

• Recognizing and acknowledging the meaningful aspects of interpersonal relationships and nurturing them
• Uncovering areas where the relationship may benefit from collective growth and communicating them
• Identifying challenges in the relationship and actively working toward addressing them constructively and openly to nurture stronger relationships

Mindfulness to Make Life a Bed of Roses (Despite the Thorns!)

The Rose, Bud, and Thorns exercise isn’t just for grand projects or life-altering decisions. It is a powerful tool for cultivating a growth mindset as you reflect on your week or even your day. For instance, a student can use it in school to identify what brought them joy, areas where they can improve their study habits, and revisit challenging concepts. Similarly, professionals may use it to improve their work habits as they identify the roses, buds, and thorns. 

Taking the time to write down these moments—big or small—develops mindfulness and gratitude. You appreciate the small wins that made you proud while also recognizing avenues of growth and working toward them. Incorporating this small practice into your routine unlocks a world of personal and professional development.

If you’re looking for a way to make this reflective exercise a habit while organizing your thoughts and reflections, then is a great platform. From setting reminders to centralizing data, helps you improve: one rose, one bud, and one thorn at a time.

To experience the platform for yourself, sign up for a free account today.

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