 Welcome everyone. What a good crowd, that's really amazing. So I hope you're in the right session here. I have to give an disclaimer before we get started. So first of all, this session on retrospective is kind of the topic. It's not about any games or activities. Yeah, right? So this is what you can find in a lot of books out there, also on the web and so on. And I just felt that what's missing very often is to look at the skills and capabilities of a facilitator. And not so much on what you do, but how you do it. So this session is about that. So in case you're looking for games, that's not it. That's the one disclaimer. I have another disclaimer which is a bit weird as well because while talking about retrospectives and also things, how you do stuff and so on, first of all, this session here is not a retrospective. So don't tell me later on I didn't eat my own dog's food and so on. So I know that I don't because it's not a retrospective and it's a talk, right? And it's more on the meta level on what's happening in retrospectives. And I hope, and that's why I have this other meetings here as well, I hope that you can also make use of it for other meetings other than retrospectives. The main focus is on retrospectives. Okay, enough about this, I guess. Well, and of course I have for the people who have been in my other session yesterday, they know this probably already. So all of my books here, there's a little bit of a marketing campaign. However, I didn't bring enough books, it seems. So I have three left on their retrospectives for organizational change, which I brought with me. And the cost of delay, that's gone. But in case you're interested after the talk, just talk to me. Okay, I think we can get started, right? Let's see. So that's my agenda. I first want to look at something that you might find a little bit boring, which is I want to look at preparation and design of a retrospective. Then I hope that you find really a lot of value in facilitator and also in specific problems that I've experienced myself and I also have seen others kind of experiencing and then thinking about what to do about this and wrapping up. Okay, for the preparation and design, getting started with a room. So I wouldn't have liked this room, actually. Starting with how many people are in that room, it would be much too small to do anything decent. So the size of the room often makes a big difference. And then also in terms of the location, where the room really is. So the typical question, do we want to do this on-site or off-site? Do we even run the meeting, the retrospective in the room we are working? I advise not to. But I also know that sometimes that's the only option you are having and so you better use that option than not running a retrospective. So I know that too. But I would work on finding a room that's more adequate than your usual working room. Then another thing about the room is what I find important. First of all, can I use the walls and put stuff on the wall? If I can't, which can be true as well, then I have to find a way how to make things transparent and visualize them. So for example, one thing that I really like a lot, and I have no idea if you get them here in Singapore or wherever home is for you, we have statically preloaded flip charts. So I see some people nodding, so some of you might know them. So you just put them on the wall and you don't need any tape, sticky, anything, and so they won't leave any track on the wall. And that's something that you can use all over the place. What I also like about them too is that you can use them as a whiteboard. So write out stuff that you have written on it and pack them together and carrying on with you. Maybe even reuse them. Then another thing in terms of location, I prefer to have a room which is good here where the furniture is movable. Sometimes I have experience and had the retrospective in a room where the furniture was fixed to the floor. You have probably seen that too. It's much harder. However, if you know about it in advance, you can deal with this. So in case you can make explicit what's good for you, what kind of room, then say so. What else do we need? Well, the facilitator, of course. Then there is also the question, which is a typical one, is an internal or external facilitator? Well, this depends also on the needs of the team or the crew you are facilitating here. And remember, external could also be just external to that crew. Then I believe the last question in terms of this whole organizational preparation is who will be in that meeting or in the retrospective? Well, one answer is it's the team. Another answer is maybe it's like one level up management as well because sometimes you need the backing from the management in order to really make some decisions and put them into practice. And if we forget them, we will not get the money, for example, for doing so. So that can be important at times. And another thing that can be important at times is to have the customer with you in the retrospective because the customer brings a different perspective on what has happened. And what we typically do is that from time to time, we have the customer with us. And just as a thought, who is there really? Okay, then so that was organizational preparation and I have to look at my watch. How long does it go to? Half past, right? Then methodology. I always have these difficult words, it seems, in all of my time. Methodical, is that right? I don't know. Methodical, methodical. Okay, oh my gosh. Preparation, sorry. Should have really rehearsed that over and over. So I have done it really in this, I know you can't read it, at least not the half of the room, but I have done methodical preparation in a very proper way which is kind of what I have here, how I present it. Very often it's just a sketch and it's not really proper like that. However, what I always do is think about the timing. So how long should something take? What's the order of it? What's the activity thing I want to do? What exactly is happening there? So it's activity and the method. Then I might have some comments and the actors. So what are the people who are involved with that? So maybe it's more me, maybe it's the whole crew, maybe it's somebody specifically doing something here. So it's the actors who are involved in that activity or method I'm using and then what kind of material is needed. So that's the key thing about like the method or the layout or the design of how you want to run that meeting. Again, which this is also helpful in any kind of meeting, not only in a retrospective. And then the probably most important thing about this is to come up with a plan B. Because, well, I always prepare and maybe I'm really, really German. I didn't say so in advance, but I'm German and so I really prepare myself and do the things in a kind of strict way but I never stick to it because things are happening and so I change and I'm not following this as a plan that needs to be followed but it helps me to kind of anticipate the meeting in advance. And this is helpful for really coming up with good results. So I really suggest you to focus also on a methodical preparation. Can you speak that word? Ha, getting there. Okay, then the meeting agenda and I assume for retrospective you all have seen that. So this is what Esther Derby and Diana Larson came up with in the very famous book which I absolutely recommend and I assume most of you know it, have it and whatever. So the meeting agenda for retrospective is exactly that. So first we set the stage, then we gather data, insights, decide what to do and they have a closing. The interesting thing to me and I just realized I didn't really say much about myself, I recently went through a masters program which was on business coaching and change management and there I learned which is interesting because I've been in that business for a long time, business coaching and change management. It occurred to me the first time that facilitation is really at the core of that, of change and of coaching. And probably this is also why my interest in facilitation is so big. However, why I'm saying this is because of in that master's studies what I learned as well, well there's like a classical layout for any kind of workshop and there the agenda is like that. You have an introduction, then you collect topics, you select the topics and work on them and then you have an action planning and closing. It's exactly the same just different wording than what we have here in the retrospective which also means a retrospective is nothing else than any other kind of workshop if you will and I'm saying this not for maybe downplaying retrospectives I'm saying that this opens up a lot of material for you because you can look up at any book which is dealing around like facilitating workshops or any kinds of meetings and just make that translation and when they talk about collecting topics well that's gather data, right? So it's really, you can make use of a lot of stuff that's out there so that's something that I found helpful. So I'm not really going into details here. I think that I have only one point of setting the stage which I learned some things which I found helpful. Well first of all coming up with a goal for that meeting for that retrospective which is probably not something pretty new however what might be new to you what I always do is for that goal I define an acceptance test with the group I'm working with saying okay when would this meeting this retrospective be a success for you? When would we pass that? So what would mark that acceptance test for that meeting and that's a different maybe attitude to framing where you are heading. Yeah that's the one thing, the other thing and that might be something you do anyway I don't know is at the start and this would be a too big crowd of doing that is I always want to go once round so everyone has said something at the very start I feel like this is opening up something so that people are not afraid so much in speaking speaking up in front of the group once they have been saying something and whatever they say well on the one hand it could be important but it must not be necessarily important often one thing that I like to do is for example write ideas for the acceptance test so when would for you that retrospective be successful and when would you think it would be a failure and so like this is a question we can't get around and so we collect that so that could be a good idea another thing which shouldn't be forgotten and to be honest at times I forget is at the beginning to also clarify any administrative concerns whatever it is how much time do we have available so anything that's outside of the content of what we are focusing on I guess oh yeah that's almost it dealing with time that's not showing the real time that's whatever time I don't know actually that was PowerPoint offering me that when I looked for time so you can take that and I was surprised when I saw that it was running oh it keeps running that's cool okay so in terms of time so one thing which is pretty well known is using time boxes for whatever you are doing however also there you have to be flexible because there is and think of your methodical preparation maybe you thought about well we need ten minutes for that and then you figure people are really in discussion and it probably would be a bad idea to stop here and although you said it's a time box but maybe there's more time needed and so maybe it's good another thing is also in retrospective using a lean coffee approach so just for specific things putting like short times aside and only like dipping into it and maybe last advice in terms of time which is on the one hand obvious and again also I myself forget about this at times is just ask ask how much time do you think you will need is maybe two more minutes okay or maybe you need more maybe less how far are you done and so being more flexible with that so time boxes are a good start but they are not serving every purpose and also you always need some flexibility if your focus is to get results you don't want to just ensure that the time is passing by right okay that's for the organizational for the design and preparation then the facilitator so me, you first of all the definition of it and again that's what I got from this master's study so what the official definition is that the facilitator is an objective supporter servant of the group he she is a midwife for the content meaning not involved in creating the content but helping the content to be created right the problem here is well who is the facilitator maybe you are part of the group maybe you are part of the team this gets harder and harder and so you may have to be very clear in what your current role is are you at the moment really acting as a facilitator or do you want to make a contribution sometimes it's helpful just to move from one side to the other and say okay now I'm a participant and so my perspective on this is blah blah blah right so if you are in this dual role um so the thing is really helping the group the team coming up with something and this is by what you have done in your methodical preparation so providing a method for that meeting and also by visualizing what's going on and by ensuring everyone has a voice so it's not only the talkative people here who are contributing I come back to this just in a I don't know like two slides or something okay so that's the definition of the facilitator a model that I found really helpful is something that's called theme centered interaction maybe it looks a little bit old it's because it is old so it's not that I made it old and the theme centered interaction says if you are in a meeting then there are always at least three things at play so the one is I so how am I here in this meeting and I means well it could mean the facilitator but basically mainly it means the people who are part of that group you are facilitating then so in terms of people the individuals really that's the I so it's really one and the other one right then we have the we which is what's happening with the whole group so speaking of group dynamics we all probably have heard about that and then the third thing is the it which is the subject that topic at hand which is the goal we defined beforehand right and so these three things they are embedded that's what theme centered interaction says they are embedded in the globe so saying in the environment for example in the company or part of that project or whatever so there is there are some constraints that are defined and they are just there now the thing is as a facilitator your task is to provide a balance between the individual the group and the topic at hand and now that you think or you might think oh that's cool so now I figured how to have that balance TCI says well the idea is not to keep the balance but to tip from one to the other because if you completely balance that out nothing will happen because you are stuck basically so you want to focus on the individual and you want to focus more on the group dynamics and you want to focus more on the topic so just ensuring and again this influences your methodical preparation ensuring that all of these three have their maybe own rights and enough time and that yeah you just ensure that they are all there oh yeah there's one more one more really important thing of TCI TCI says so it comes with a few rules and one of the rules is disturbances take preference and what it what it means is I guess most of you have seen that experience that you are in a meeting as a facilitator or participant it doesn't really matter and somebody knocks at the door whatever manager boss comes in and says like oh I need you for a second and please go ahead and keep on with your meeting and so walking up to one guy and then picking him or talking to him and well you could think like okay so I keep going on with that meeting but you can't it's a disturbance that's there and it has to be acknowledged and it's not acknowledging like appreciating it that's not what's meant but it's just there and you can't ignore it that's the point so any kind of disturbance that's there and disturbance most often that come from outside so kind of yeah as I described it or also when you think of the keynote it worked out fine but I felt like oh not much more thunder and lightning and I can't hear anything anymore right we had the thunderstorm and lightning like every morning for the keynote it was like right timing it's a disturbance that's there and sometimes you also have disturbances from the inside meaning that people are very passionate about something because they see their point and they really have to say it and if you kind of kill that well it's still there it's like the elephant in the room and my belief the next thing yeah that fits very nicely to that which is the way well again a difficult world let's see if I can pronounce that constructivistic oh that was good constructivistic well then perspective means that we all have our own truth and we see the world from our own view and angle and we can't assume that somebody else like you have the same view on the world that I have even if we are working together every day it's just like well we are individuals and there is a model that I find helpful which I want to share which is called Fall Truths it comes from human systems dynamics so there's a website as well hsdinstitute.org there are a lot of great models and methods there and the the way it works or what it does is it says whatever we are doing there are always fall truth around us and the first truth is probably the most obvious one which is a subjective truth and the example that I brought with me here today is if we think about noise because I just thought that probably translates to a lot of cultures so there are always people who are like different maybe I'm at the beach and there's really nobody and I still feel like a little bit disturbed because of the waves rolling into the shore because I can't stand noise not at all and then there are other people they go to a rock concert and they think oh this is really not loud enough for a rock band what is that right so we have different perceptions here of course also depending on the context that's true as well but still so I'm not sure if you have seen it I see that a lot and we talk and we do pair programming there are always some people who say well this is disturbing me I'm one of my own office where it's all quiet and all of that so it's yeah well noise is seen differently so that was a subjective truth then we have the objective truth which is something you can measure well in terms of noise you can still measure it but what's something you can deal with that's probably another topic however the official measures say that what people can stand during the day is 40 decibel and during night it's 30 and actually I'm not sure if this is international or it's a European number whatever so there are numbers out there which kind of say this is what's possible so objective truth always something to measure and go against that and then we have on the top something that's called normative truth that's the truth we decide in our team that this is how we can get along with for example it's like this we talk to each other but in a more maybe more silent voice and not so loud so that the people at the other desk can still understand each other and also talk to each other so that we have some agreement there okay these were three truths subjective objective normative and now it's getting complex which is the complex truth that's the question mark saying well all of those three truths are always there no matter what we decide and agree upon so it could mean that one of them takes precedence no matter what we decided maybe I feel today this is really so noisy and so even this what we agreed upon like the silent kind of quietly talking to each other is too loud for me maybe I parted yesterday okay so that's the four truths the way I'm using it if we really get into a heated discussion for example in a retrospective so one thing is for me to know about this that's one thing that I find helpful another thing that I find helpful is I am presenting that model to the group when we have that heated discussion which typically is good enough for people being more aware of that's how it is it's not that only my truth is the right one but there are just people with different perspectives and therefore they have their own truths so that's creating more sensibility here okay then participants in the focus that's one thing that I talked about a little bit beforehand which is thinking about how to involve or engage the participants in your meeting and one thing is well sometimes we just collect the pluses and minuses and so on which I think is not a retrospective way however what's important in order to ensure that not always the same people are talking is first of all differentiate the participation style which is like do stuff which is focusing on the individual only and this goes also back to the TCI right theme centered interaction so individual reflection like that old lady is doing here then another thing is you have a pairing thing where also it's more likely that really the two people are talking and it's not only one is talking and then you might have subgroups or the whole group doing something and interchange between those formats is often helpful another thing interchange between orally and written writing style or maybe you want to draw something that's why I also picked that lady because she's standing in front of that picture so just different styles often also help that different people are participating and a last maybe the simple but most effective one is if you go round I said this already in the opening round that everyone says something and you can use this of course also during the retrospective if you use something and just ask everyone to make a contribution then if you do that please ensure that per person per round you are only allowed to say one thing because if you don't do that maybe you have seen that as well and you said sit in the end of that round everything has been said and you feel like oh I can't contribute and just because the first two guys they were just throwing out like all the five points everyone had on his mind and on the other hand by allowing only this one after the other and just one thing also helps that everyone kind feels of oh we are all thinking along the same lines and otherwise you are so or at least I'm so frustrated that I can say anything and everything has been said that I kind of back up from the whole thing so that's probably a really simple tip but helps a lot facilitator and the pressure you will see in a second why I have that picture here which is if you feel like oh I really don't know what to do here now it's a really weird situation and not sure how to act now or how to facilitate here first step is to take a deep breath just a right oh yeah that's cool the second step is what that picture I thought is for change your physical location so change your perspective and change your perspective really physically this often makes a whole difference we talk often about that changing perspectives but really changing the place you are standing or sitting or whatever makes often a big difference and then observe so that's the third thing so take a deep breath change your perspective and then observe what's going on sometimes if it's really if you feel we are really stuck here I ask the same thing to all the participants so also for the participants one of the most important thing probably here is well maybe the deep breath but really the change of the location where they are sitting this again opens up a lot of things and I thought this is like a really fun what's going on sometimes but you could also use maybe the only game I'm having here well game activity is the Disney method which you could use here so asking people to step into the roles Disney has used like the creative dream or what would happen if so making it a really positive thing and then you have the realistic planner saying like ball but if we want to do this we really would need that and then you have the constructive critic who would then say okay but that's what's really going on here so really taking kind of a role play in order to get out of your stuck situation I think we are fine then we are coming to the specific problems and I've seen on the wall people referencing already Virginia Satir and I just realized I think I thought of doing them one after the other and I tried to do this so on top you see the denial anger, bargaining, depression and then the acceptance that's from a lady called Kubler-Ross and both of them so the one below is Virginia Satir the one on the top which isn't as pretty as from Kubler-Ross and they both refer to what's going on if you go through a change and let's take the one on the top first and I want to maybe explain that with an example so when well you all have seen that there's an update of a software well it fits well to Goikos talk before and for example what I often struggle with is a new version of PowerPoint I have a colleague who really did go through those stages just by example so first of all there was this update of so new PowerPoint version and of course he was completely ignoring it so denying that it exists and he had his busy this old version everything fine however they came the time where he had to get a new PC and the new one only came with this new version of PowerPoint so there wasn't anything about denying anymore he was really angry kind of yeah complaining about it all the time then the next thing was the bargaining what he did was he found a plugin after installing it the new PowerPoint just supposed to be the old one cool so that's that thing however then there comes a time where first of all there's one or the other thing that's not working probably or he gets slides from somebody else who uses something that's not there in the old version and therefore things are not really the way they should so it's kind of that depression going on and finally he finds out like oh maybe the new version can do stuff I was looking for a long time and so coming into acceptance so that's the Kubler-Ross model actually coming from grief after losing a person that's how she was developing it but it's really if you're realistic true for all kinds of change then Virginia Satir kind of says a similar thing well you are on a status problem maybe PowerPoint usage then the foreign element the new version you drop into chaos you have your ups and downs maybe you think oh it's maybe it's not too bad but then there's another thing where you don't find the menu anymore and you're like oh it's all screwed up and you're just up and down until you get to a transforming idea where you think oh maybe yeah it is really practical integration and practice and you come to the new status quo so that's something we all go through but if we are now in a retrospective where we are talking a lot about things we want to change or things we plan to have changed and nothing happened the thing is that every individual goes through these curves some very quickly in one circumstance and from another circumstance maybe the same person it takes a long time because it's really true for all of us now the the big problem is if I'm just kind of all through that and I'm in the integration and practice because I have gone through this with my mind for a while then maybe somebody else in the group hears that for the first time and this is the moment and I guess you all have heard that too like some people say oh we are not starting that discussion again we have gone through that before and the point is that person who wants to go through that discussion again is probably at a different stage as you are and so for that person it's probably needed maybe one more thing about change I heard I have to speed up here well first of all I learned that you have to have a cat in every slide deck in order that people like it so the other thing is we are talking about resistance to change and cats are just animals who are not following on they just do their stuff right so this is one of the things on the other hand that I said well you have them in every slide deck because they are very attractive to people it seems the highest click rate on YouTube well what I'm heading at is that if you think somebody is resistant to change if you take an approach on attitude which is something that's created in the complexity and chaos theory is they are saying there is no such thing as resistance to change but there is always an attractor that seems to be more attractive than that change you want to kind of implementing so kind of like people are looking for the cats YouTube and not for another YouTube because I think the cat is more attractive right so what you need to find out is what is the attractor why somebody is resistant to that change what keeps that person away from that change what is that attractive thing and once you know about that you can either try to implement or yeah implement that attraction also to that changing thing or maybe you can work with that person in order to kind of find another attractor in the change so thinking about resistance more as something like an attractor is also something that at least helps for me when yeah I deal with difficult situations oh my gosh yeah problem seems unsolvable we all have seen that but I find really helpful here is what's called solution focused approach which is well we have that problem we don't really know how to solve that and let's just assume we have that here so today is the last day of the conference you do whatever you do go home or let's assume we are living all in Singapore so we are going home having dinner with our family maybe doing some sports activity watch TV or so and go to bed the next morning we are getting up and that problem is solved it's gone however nobody told you that's gone overnight a miracle has happened which you don't know what it was but the problem is gone and so the question is how do you know that the problem is gone who else would know it what marks that difference and yeah who else would mark would recognize that difference so this again is something that opens up something if you are in a stuck situation so just thinking very positively about the situation and imagine that a miracle has happened so that's something that I really like to use which is different than looking at for example asking five times why are you digging to the problem deeper and deeper it's just the opposite here you just imagine it's gone okay so now what's the situation and then if you know what the situation is you can plan for actions how to get there which is often easier I really like to show this as well which is and then probably we finish the problem seems not solvable by the team so there I have a few things so one thing is sometimes it's part of the team's culture so they always come up in the retrospective with things they can't change it's always some people around them so people around them who just screwed things up and that's why they can't do whatever they can do so that's the first question another question is that you figure out who's really in control here and maybe you invite that person as I said at the beginning maybe the manager should be here so you really can kind of make a difference here however the thing that I really found the most powerful is the thing that's called paradox intervention it's actually something that's even pronounceable surprisingly paradox intervention what it does is if you're saying okay we have that problem how can we make that problem worse and this is your question your question is not how to solve it your question is to the whole group how to make that problem worse how can we make it really so bad that it's terrible bad and remember we said at the beginning it's a situation where the team really feels they are not in control it's people around them who created that however I've never never ever experienced that people were not coming up with a way how to make that situation worse they always come up with making the situation worse and they have quite fun in doing so it's always like oh yeah and then we could do blah blah blah and so it's cool however now the trick is then once you know what you can do to make it worse you also know you can do something about that situation you also can make it better because you can influence the situation really and it could be just by like how you act and react to what's going on but often it's much more than that and you only figure out by thinking about this like how to make it worse and then you know how to make it better and improve it okay that's very good and I'm coming to the end because I heard I'm running out of time or have been running out of time so facilitation wants to ensure that everyone has a voice that you have to buy in from everyone by being inclusive and share changing between like remember that individuals pairing then the like a subgroup or the whole group so creating shared understanding ensuring that different perspectives sometimes really physically this is needed in order to change a perspective and to open up and it should support learning and only quickly so these are some of the references so there are more and more retrospective books out here however remember you can look up any kind of workshop facilitation book they also fit to retrospectives and thank you to Katya and Yana for the pictures and we have two more minutes I think thank you two more minutes for questions I probably can take two or three how do you make a team member who is not speaking up on shared issues so how can I make a team member who is not speaking up to be contributing to the retrospectives so one of the things is really doing like individual things so individual reflections and also doing stuff in writing often helps but I'm not sure is this where you're getting it yeah not speaking up is what you said so not basing everything you do on speaking that's the main thing and what I find often helpful is doing I don't remember how it's called I'm sure somebody knows it here in the room so you start with an individual reflection then you pair up or triple up and then you have like maybe five or six people together before you have like the whole group how big ever then your group is which means whatever individual has contributed will be kind of forwarded to the next bigger group and that person might not speak up once it's presented to the whole group but with the pairing and especially if you say it's written up then it's still there yeah maybe one more yeah that's a really difficult question how to facilitate retrospectives for not non-collocated teams which is actually I would think a completely new topic which takes another I don't know time it depends very very much what your setting is for example if you are basically on two locations you have like four people here and three people there then it's very helpful to have a facilitator at each site and ensure that whatever is happening is synchronized every once in a while and you spread up again however if you are like completely dispersed so everyone sits at the different site then everything is virtual and regarding the time I think my best advice is that you need to have more time for preparation so you do more prep work for that and for example appreciate inquiry questions in advance help there which is like but what you think is really important and good and helpful in our situation so coming up with some questions where people are answering and you collecting presenting it there and then also kind of yeah splitting out again so at least I think often virtual meetings they train a lot of energy but again it's a really a complete new topic right and I don't know we are out of time one last question okay when you say some students when working with no problem teams no what teams? they have no problems ah they have no problems ah right that's a good point yeah which is so one thing that I found helpful there is that I asked do I have that book here the norm curse original switch it off retrospective book nothing's working here okay so the first book on retrospectives from norm curse where he has a thing that's called definition of success so he's more talking about end of project retrospectives but you can also use that end of sprint retrospective and the thing is you say you ask has this last sprint been a success and we define this success as we would do everything exactly the same way as we did in the past sprint and this often is enough that people say like well yeah but this maybe not so that's sometimes a trigger for coming up with something else another thing that you could do is maybe use your retrospective and do a value stream analysis and see how you create value with the team and by coming up with this value stream you I bet you find points where well there are waiting times handing handover people misunderstand each other and therefore not really moving forward so using something like this which is focusing on the results that have been created and how they have been created probably would help as well I just think about the way I'm talking about it it's not so much different than the definition of success actually looking at the value stream it's just from a different angle but maybe when I sleep over it I think it's not really the same yeah okay thank you very much as I said I had your books that we are interested and thank you