I’m a huge fan of Agile retrospectives! Sitting with you on a sofa enjoying hot drinks, I might even feel like making the case that retrospectives are the most valuable and useful tool in the Agile kit. But, like most things, they don’t “just work.” It takes commitment, focus, respect, courage, and openness from everyone on the team. Oh, hai! Those are the Scrum values!
The problem is that I do mean everyone. One person, even if they are merely apathetic, can quickly turn retros into meaningless rituals. Because everyone in the room works toward the sprint goal, we need everyone to improve our capabilities to meet those goals. Whether we are missing information or getting bogged down in unproductive conflicts (there are plenty of productive disputes), we miss the keystone of a cyclical improvement process.
Let me put it another way. Agile is an empirical approach. Meaning, we improve by examining our processes, technologies, interactions, and productive output and then formulating theories on how to improve that we then put to the test. We take the evidence, construct a hypothesis, and then run an experiment to see if observations confirm our ideas or not. That’s the essence of science.
To analogize more, let’s say we want to know the most significant contributor to the cabbage growth rate. Maybe it’s the light spectrum, light duration, nitrogen levels in the soil, or water levels. Setting up this experiment with proper controls and sufficient samples is complicated. Not difficult. Just complex. We’ll end up with a big ole test matrix. Then we’ll have a bunch of statistics to run on the data we collected. Let’s consider our situation if one of the batches (an element in the test matrix) gets destroyed by aphids. We can’t use that data and will need to rerun the test and hope it doesn’t happen again. We could do something to prevent aphid infestation, but then we have to rerun all tests.
As someone facilitating a retrospective, you might find yourself in some troubled waters with no sightline to land. Your team’s got aphids. With all this mixing of metaphors, I’m not sure if we should break out the Neem oil or get a GPS! I’ll rein myself back in here. The point is that we will need to be a coach more than a note-taker or coordinator. We might even need to work closely with the individual team members’ managers. Helping everyone on the team express courage, openness, respect, and focus is our mission.
This work gets personal. And for some of our teammates, this isn’t the kind of work that we can help them with no matter how much trust and respect we share. For some, this is going to be the realm of their mental health professionals. We will have highly capable, high functioning, high performers who experience neurological diversities, survived traumas, or suffer psychological disorders on our teams. We might not be aware of their experiences and struggles.
Many of the Scrum values will present challenges for these folks. For example, expecting a survivor of childhood trauma to express courage by speaking candidly about their peers’ interactions in a group setting might not be realistic and certainly isn’t equitable. Coaching empathy to a person who’s physically incapable of feeling emotions the same way most people do is absurd.
As Agilists, we believe in the empowerment of teams and individuals. So, what can we do? Again, I want to point out that we might not even know that our teammates have these struggles. We might just see a jerk or a shy person, which are toxic personal judgments.
I’ve come to appreciate the ability of Liberating Structures to help empower more people. They aren’t perfect, but they help many people become more engaged by providing safer environments. But there are still opportunities for improvement. Many of the structures reduce or ease into group work. Most rely on handwriting. I’d love to see technological solutions that provide at least 1 step that is 100% anonymous and safe if not coordinating entire structures anonymously. In the current world of virtual meetings, something that integrates with Zoom’s breakout rooms would be marvelous! We won’t be able to remove interactions, but we can make them much safer for everyone.
Maybe that will end up on my project list. Or perhaps you’ll start an open-source project or a startup!
In the meantime, let’s remember the values are for empowerment. If we coach in ways that disempower or disenfranchise, we’ve missed the boat. Let’s keep modeling the behaviors we want to see from our team, coaching the Agile and Scrum values, and finding creative ways to empower everyone!