This was a new type of retrospective for me and I tried it out with our team in India. It’s something I learned from Aino Vonge Curry at a recent agile conference in Cambridge.
It’s a great retrospective that can be used in any situation and I’m sure you’ll make some breakthroughs as a result. We did but, interestingly, we noticed a different ‘anti-pattern’ to what Aino outlined in her book (mentioned below).
How does it work?
The idea is that, after some discussion, we write some wishes on a post-it note (i.e. changes that we’d like to see happen). One wish per post-it note.
Post-its are then placed in one of three concentric circles which have been drawn on a board. The central circle is for wishes that we, as a team, can action on. If you can make that wish happen, put that post-it in the central circle!
The second circle is for wishes that we cannot action on directly but we can influence someone else to take that action.
Anything outside of that is in ‘the soup’ – these are wishes that we can do nothing about. It’s the way it is. We have to find a way accept this somehow and work around it.
So, as planned, we spent a few minutes writing our wishes on a post-it note. Then, in small groups we put them on the board. I asked everyone to briefly give some context to their post-it and then to see if we needed to group their wish with any of the other wishes on the board.
To give you some context – our developers are part of a seperate company, based in India. For this retrospective, no managers were allowed in.
Surprising insights
As I was listening to the group give context to their post-its, I was looking at an almost perfect, bright yellow circle and it struck me that almost every post it had been added to the second ring – ‘team can influence’. I spontaneously decided to challenge the developer who was currently talking to see if his wish was something he could, in fact, action on. Upon reflection, it turned out it was something that could be actioned on, so we moved it to the central circle – ‘team can action on’. I then went back through all the wishes and challenged everyone one by one. We managed to move almost all of the wishes to the central circle.
Whereas most people think that many of our wishes are out of our control, it turns out that we’re more empowered than we think (or even, than we like to think). Interestingly, this is different to the antipattern that Aino identifies for this retrospective in her book, ‘Retrospective Antipatterns’ whereby many groups just end up talking about things in ‘the soup’ – i.e. they focus on things they can never change anyway.
In our case, it was different. The key breakthrough here for us was about self-empowerment – this means that by avoiding a tendency to defer the power-to-change to others, we realise that we have a lot of power to make small but important changes that make a difference us individually and the whole.
—
Recommended reading
(Even though I haven’t finished reading it myself):
Retrospective Antipatterns – Aino Vonge Curry (available online)
A key element for continuous improvement is the retrospection which acts as the system’s feedback loop. But, since we are human, we can easily fall into mental blocks, inertia and bad habits. This book looks at the ‘antipatterns’ of retrospectives and diagnoses them in an almost medical manner! The book can be read, browsed or used as a reference (like a manual for outlining good posture for yoga or weightlifting) with the ultimate aim to ensure that our retrospectives remain effective and we can continuously improve.