 Welcome everybody thank you very much for being here I hope you've all had some coffee because this is the last or quite late in the day and I hope you're awake and that I can keep you awake for the next 90 minutes. My name is Cara Turner I'm from Cape Town South Africa and I'm an agile coach I'm the chairperson of the Scrum User Group in South Africa and I'm a rigorous tinkerer. I like to try things out and see what happens and this talk is about the what I've learned and discovered over the last couple of years while I've been tinkering with creativity in fairly normal fairly standard software development teams and using the retrospective specifically. So this talk is about motivation and engagement and how we can use the retrospectives to build those and team creativity. So it's in three sections and these three sections cover the mechanics of what I'm indebted to Deval for calling creating the harmonious space for which we can bring our creative thinking into work. I'm going to talk about how we generate new ideas, how our brains work, I'm going to talk about motivation at work and then I'm going to talk about rethinking the retrospective as a creative tool. I'm not going to talk about how to run retrospectives so for those of you who are hoping to get that there's a little bit in the third section but it's not going to be that part of it. Similarly creativity is a very broad subject and your definition of it it's like saying tasting is different from somebody else's definition of it. So if you find you are not in the right talk I'm a firm believer in the law of two feet which goes if you're not learning and you're not contributing use your own pair of these and go somewhere where you will be because your time is precious and I will respect that no worries. Okay so you have a few moments now I would like you to work in groups if you're at tables or if you're in the chairs just have a chat with the people around you about what your current understanding of a retrospective is what are the characteristics what does it mean to you and we're going to have three minutes to discuss that when three minutes are up I'm going to stick my hand up like this and that means that the time's up when you finish talking or you notice my hands up please put your hand up too and then you'll be surprised how quickly that sorts the room if you want to be leaving now is a good time I've got here that if you if you're happy to help as well this is three okay I love how that works okay so hopefully you amongst your discussion you'll have had some of these words things like inspect and adapt gathering data continuous improvements smart goals goals of any sort smart specific measurable attainable relevant time-bound there are a few variations on that so we use retrospectives to get better at what we do and I start off by talking about how we generate new ideas and because this is something that all happens in the mind I'm going to be talking a little bit about the mind or the brain anyway some variation or some distinction so it turns out we're all having ideas all the time we're built like this some of you in the audience right now are thinking about which session you're going to go to next some of you are wondering about the lunch that you had earlier and deciding well if I tried something you did I like it do I want to try something different tomorrow and we do this all the time this is our decision-making framework we have an idea about something that we need to make a decision about we go and we do it we get some feedback and we kind of update our existing assumptions and thinking based on that neural networks these kinds of ideas are not necessarily breakthrough ideas although the next question you go to might be breakthrough and will change it so please do it on the whole most of our ideas are fairly my mundane and why is that few things that limit creative thinking first off is the existing neural networks we have so those are the process by which we make an assumption we go we check it out we update and it creates a set of connections in our brain that we call a neural network and it's very useful for when we encounter situations that are familiar to us so we don't have to go and work out what all the possibilities are and what are possible what our constraints and everything are every time we do something with which we are familiar so it helps us to be more productive and more effective it also means that when we encounter something familiar we kind of hop on that existing network and we don't stop and go well how could we do this differently so it kind of creates the routines and in order to change the routines we're in we need to be able to disrupt our thinking the other thing that affects us is the experience of straight or pressure so when we're wired that when we encounter a straight in life our brain stops focusing on anything but the problem and how to get away from the problem and apparently it's evolutionary that you encounter a wild animal and you stop looking at the patterns in the leaves and you look at how you can get away I suspect it's still very useful if you're in the wrong side of town you still want to be working out how to get away from that problem but in our work environments hopefully none of our colleagues are trying to kill us would be advantageous and that we actually need to collaborate with each other to solve problems in a creative way unfortunately our brain has a secondary circuit with when the threat the immediate threat is gone we check are we still feeling under pressure and if we are maintain that status quo so if our work environment is highly stressful we're unlikely to get out of that focus on the problem and how to get away from the problem for long enough to stop and go well what are my other alternatives so the less stress you're under the more likely it is you're going to be coming up with creative ideas and the last thing of course is time and how often do you have an idea that kind of it's a bright spark and then it disappears because we haven't got we haven't created a space in which to play with our ideas and so very few of them get remembered and pulled into our working environment but we have retrospectives right so things that help us let go of these constraints first off laughter the most valuable tool there is for getting out of that stressed environment to be able to look at different and new connections there's three things that support that novelty dissonance and play novelty our brains are wired to pay attention to anything that we see for the first time we release dopamine at that time and that is that happy nice chemical you may have heard about that feeling of loveliness because new things offer us new opportunities and with dopamine or that happy feeling we can see new parts dissonance which literally means to sound wrong and the opposite of harmony dissonance is the experience we have when an idea clashes with our existing neural network and it doesn't make sense to us it's an uncomfortable feeling so we only want this for a short period of time because sustained dissonance of course is stress so people who are talking about getting you out of your comfort zone it's the dissonance part of things that they're trying to create to break that pattern and play the play is the activity by which we entertain new ideas we can try out new combinations we can experiment in a safe to fail way play is the way in which we all learn it doesn't break our connections but it helps us to make new connections and they're two tools for that metaphor and imagining the future to talk about how can metaphor help you to have an idea if you think about software that is buggy and i'm sure you've all encountered a software system that has had bugs and you try to compare it with a canoe what might you get holes yet in english there's a saying that you're up an unpleasant creek in a leaky canoe the immediate association is with troubles that you're in if you take a little bit further canoes are things for going on a voyage so you might need to go on a journey to understand your problem differently metaphor helps us to create language for things that we know instinctively but is tacit knowledge to us it helps to us to make it explicit helps us to share that information with other people what if we compare our buggy software with a UFO what do we get then pardon unknown yeah this one is harder right this one is dissonance okay so maybe you've got to look at your software as if you were giving it to aliens that they don't they don't read the same way you do maybe the whole way in which we're communicating or sending things through the pipes is following a different route and maybe we have to travel to a completely new perspective to see our software again to understand where the bugs are coming in so dissonance which doesn't quite fit our neural network makes us force new connections which helps us to create new options so metaphor is that true how can imagining the future help us to have an idea so this one's a bit odd you know the feeling at the end of the day or maybe you're on holiday and you put your feet up and you chill out and you start reflecting on how your life is going you do some daydreaming and what's been happening and where you'd like to go that set of neural connections that we use when we're daydreaming happens to be the same set of neural connections we use when we're being creative when we're having creative ideas so simply by daydreaming we're exercising our creative thinking capacity the other part of it is of when we actively choose to be imagining the future and it's not one future of course when we imagine it there are many futures many possibilities by actively engaging with what we imagine might happen in the future we can start to prepare for a great customer feedback well in that case we need a process from which to get it back or a negative event and by preparing when we get to the future we're going to react differently than if we were unprepared it helps us to get out of reactive mode and into creative mode so visualization key skill for creative thinking which is useful to know once we have an idea we have an experience and it connects to neurons in our brain it's quite a light connection that can break very easily or dissolve or go somewhere else which is why forgetfulness or half-forgetfulness happens by repeating that experience by having it over and over that a neural connection gets stronger and sicker and it becomes more useful that we can use in plane association and the more we use that particular connection the stronger it gets and if it becomes really important to us we get these things called myelin sheets we protect that network for that connection so that it's much stronger and an idea flows from one to the other much faster than through the other kin networks which is how we build habits now remember we started off with those existing neural networks that are a limit to create thinking out of the box if your neural network includes I can think out the box then that's a strong and healthy one to have what happens when you have an idea and you share it somebody builds on it I have an idea I tell my friend I've got apples oh I've got a whole lot of fruit together we can make fruit salad it becomes we can make much richer creations than one person having an idea alone innovation is what happens when we share our ideas and build on them together and we bring our strings together so I'm not going to talk much more about innovation because it is a vast subject and this is a short time to generate breakthrough ideas we need to interrupt our existing patterns we need to create new patterns that incorporate creative thinking and we need to collaborate to shape and to share ideas we have some if you want to read more about the session these are the books I highly recommend the slides will be on the site later they are not yet have been tweaking and we have three minutes now to have if you have any questions for that and again if you wish to exercise the law of two feet this is an appropriate moment anybody have any questions pardon back to the book slide okay anything else okay I'm going to move forward then so we're all creative beings and we come to work how do we make sure that our work environment gives us the space we need to exercise our creativity it turns out that when we get to work the most important thing we really do is a whole lot of complex social interactions that are really soft skills and the ingredients amongst those interactions for creative thinking are trust and engagement and drive and it works a bit like this trust is a bit about how my work will be valued so what I believe you're going to value and that determines what I'm prepared to share so it turns trust is one of the things that we evaluate constantly we reevaluate it so if I share an idea with you this morning and I discover at lunchtime that that idea has been misused or appropriated or misrepresented I'm not going to share another idea with you or I'm going to be very guarded about what I share and what I don't engagement is whether I feel valued and that determines how much I'll collaborate engagement it's a little bit like I'm going to bet my work will be valued and then I evaluate that but engagement is about how much I want to be at work how much I want to be able to share with others and I feel respected and I respect the people I'm with and it determines how much I choose to collaborate then drive is my desire to create value which we know we all have right but in a work context it builds on top of the trust and engagement if I don't have trust and I don't feel engaged my drive isn't going to find an outlet in the work context so it determines what I'm prepared to invest of myself who's encountered this when you've go to work anybody seen that vibe it is sadly all too common and what happens here is that when the ingredients for creative thinking are missing so there's no trust or low trust you don't feel engaged and you don't want to share your passion your inspiration is set and we just kind of try to get through the day this is clock watching it's useful to know that if those are the factors that are causing that we can build them and there's been a lot of social science studies over the last 40 50 years around trust engagement and drive which i'm going to share three models now to look at what those are the start-up with trust this is a leadership model it comes from ken blanchard and it's a b c d which is they're all nice acronyms which are useful to remember engagement is a neuroscience model it comes from david rock and it's called scarf and drive is from daniel pink's book drive the surprising truth about what really motivates us did anybody read that book yeah lovely book it actually sums up most of the social science around this so it's it's a really really nice easy way in easy read and he talks about autonomy mastery and purpose so let's look at those three quickly trust this is what i will share it's the basic so we can think about it as the building blocks we need to be able to demonstrate ability we need to show that we are competent in the role that we have if we're leaders that we have deep knowledge if we're juniors and we're new to it that we have the ability to acquire knowledge and we need to be believable we need to act with integrity and say things that we mean when we say things one thing and mean another trust is broken almost immediately we need to be connected and that means related to each other we need to be able to relate to each other but it also means not physically distant so a co-located team it's much easier to build trust for a distributed team and if i'm sure a lot of you are working in distributed teams you need to find ways of continually being connected in order to maintain that trust and dependable we need to be able to deliver on our promises we need to be able to show up and be reliable so it doesn't matter how much ability you have or how much integrity you have if you're consistently unreliable you're going to erode trust over time but if you have ability and your team demonstrates ability you act with integrity you relate to each other and you're sufficiently reliable this is a good way to build trust and this model is specifically designed around rebuilding broken trust so if you're in an environment where trust is low trust starts with us so start to exercise these and you will immediately start to build bridges okay engagement this is the neuroscience model from Dave's Dave Ropp if the first layer was the building blocks and the foundation this is comfort how nice of them to call it scarf and it determines how i'll collaborate so the things that are important here stated i need to receive recognition for the work i'm doing in order to want to be applying myself it doesn't need to be huge it needs to be proportionate to the work i'm doing but i need to receive some kind of recognition in order to want to be at work i need certainty i need to know the boundaries of my software project the constraints and i also need to have some kind of reliable um call it a time framework i need to know that at 915 is my stand up or 230 that it's consistent that meetings happen at the same time that they start and end on time that level of certainty means i can give the full commitment in the space that it is available to me i need autonomy so certainty isn't having my work laid out for me autonomy is being able to choose within those very clear constraints how i'm going to go about the work i need to do preferably what i'm going to do but sometimes if we can't choose what we can we need to always be able to choose how which is why micromanagement does not work you will get things done the things that you will get done do not include a happy and engaged team so autonomy but a t to choose relatedness it's the same as connected it involves a certain amount of respect i need to respect the people i work with i need to feel that i'm valued and i need to value them i want to be working with them and we can do this through the work we can connect through the work that we're doing and fairness fairness is a funny one because certainly in the environment that i grew up in you're frequently told life isn't fair you just need to put up with that put up a shut up it's true sometimes life isn't fair but in that situation i'm not going to bring myself to work you're not going to get an engaged group of people if things happen i'm feeling and we all have a pretty fine grained sense of what is fair we don't really like blanket rules because we're all individuals so if somebody is late for stand-up and is punished is that okay if somebody else is late for pun is stand-up and isn't punished is that okay we evaluate this the same way as trust all the time and when fairness is broken trust is broken okay so that's scarf so if you're receiving recognition your constraints are clear and you can choose how you want to work you like the people you work with and it's a fair environment you're going to feel engaged and want to contribute which takes us to the point which we need to be able to deliver our work so what are the invasive myself the best i've got for this is amp with a battery fully juiced up and ready to go got the foundation we've got our scarf and now we're rolling okay so again this is autonomy what i choose to work on or how i choose to improve as a team how we choose to improve as a team mastery i need to be able to find within the work i'm doing the ability to get better at what it is i do it doesn't need to be breakthrough it needs to be a certain amount of sufficient challenge for to hook me not too much of a challenge that's overwhelming and not so easy that it's not actually a challenge it has to satisfy our desire for continuous learning and purpose this one is always left for last and it's ironic it's the last one i hear too it should be where we start purpose we can define as knowing that at least one person's life is improved by the work that we're doing hopefully the more people you know are being improved their lives the more greater a sense of purpose we feel it doesn't necessarily mean that you're working for greenpeace or even for a company that's providing funding to underprivileged communities if you are that's awesome but perhaps you have a piece of code that is causing bugs in production your clients are unhappy your team is staying up late everything is awkward if you can get to refactor that one piece that will allow your clients to ease up happiness in the team you can now build on the product that is generally or usually sufficient purpose to get a team fully engaged in what they're doing okay so that's drive and when you have all of those together we have an intrinsically motivated collaborative and skilled team who are ripe for creativity they might not yet have creative activities involved in their work but they're ripe for it who works in an organization like that one two three nice four if you don't how can we do that all this nice airy fairy hippy stuff what i'd like you to do right now and we've got a good five minutes for this at least is talk amongst yourselves the same group that you use to talk about what the retrospective is to look at how each of these elements can be generated by having regular retrospectives as they are right now okay um again after five minutes i'm going to stick my hand up like this and um no i see there's lots of conversations having amongst you guys we should technically be more sounded we should be working on it great so what did you get some some ideas so transparency helps did you talk about how you can use the retrospective to develop transparency okay nice somebody else yes yes that's a nice one nice very nice acts as a model for the others to follow and in addition to the from the drive perspective i think it's also the when we chalk out the action items for the next subsequent iterations um it it also gives an avenue of identifying where our loopholes were and what we could do better so that kind of takes us one step closer to the perfection or the mastery that's how we could generate the drive going forward so what we had there was we get to tell our stories we get to recognize each other um and we generate trust amongst each other nothing comes with the one in recounting it anybody else something from the side of the room so these elements i think are what three inner rates what we can call a self-motivating team some of these are my ideas and they are by no means complete there are every time i look at this i change the set of words uh i'm not going to go through all of them but if you had something along these lines we'll start to see how holding retrospectives that are safe places in a regular heartbeat certainty having a regular heartbeat targets allows us without changing our organizational structure without going to our managers and asking for permission to be creative asking them to give us space the retrospective of the space in which we can use our teams to become stronger and motivated which is lovely i've had teams go from being in a very distrustful very awkward position in the organization people wanting to quit people quitting everybody's on fire or everything's on fire and people close behind and and slowly but surely building up pride in themselves and the first and that's the part of telling your story to each other and recognizing your skills and over a while starting to experiment with the work and after six months to a year feeling in a position of real strength simply by using the retrospective on a regular basis you'd like to read more about this section these are books i strongly recommend the Edward Desi is probably the least well known amongst this lot i think and it's quite a lot of Daniel Pink references it in Drive and it's a worthwhile read on its own it's called why we do what we do we're all creative beings we're coming to work and we're developing and creating an environment which we're motivated to work how do we make sure that we can actually exercise our creativity where is the space where is the time i'd like to suggest that we use the retrospective it is there for our continuous improvement but we need to change it a little bit in order to use it as a creative tool so before i start changing it i'm going to talk a little bit about the history evolution of the retrospective so inspecting and adapting 1.0 the first time i held a retrospective i was saying talk you know you're going to do a project retrospective now i go google on the net and the internet says i should do it like this we're doing it to learn from our experiences we must look at what worked well what didn't work well and what ideas we have we followed that format and we got a list of things what does this give us this format data gives us data anything else yes it gives us some things to improve on so we start with some elements which are very useful it's a good place to start if you haven't been doing retrospectives before it tells us how to it helps us start to tell our stories what's wrong with this format what isn't it giving us correct and very often there's only one thing in the ideas column or two and there are things like next time bring food or in my case next time bring different food it's very hard there is no mechanism in this process for understanding our work and often if you use this over and over again we've got the same thing or everybody puts the same idea up in each of them if you don't want to be understanding your work so this is a useful tool if you're transitioning from not doing retrospectives to doing them to learn to tell your stories there's another thing that increasingly bugs me about this and that is that it looks very much like the feedback sandwich of constructive criticism and it goes a little bit like this i need to give you some bad news so i'm going to tell you some good news then i'm going to tell you the bad news and then i'm going to cushion it for something and that way you're not going to feel offended by what i'm telling you because we're not intelligent adults right so we'll go away and we've broken a little bit of trust so this format will perpetuate in an environment where there is no trust where we can't really say we think the problem lies somewhere else we think there is a problem with a manager or a manager's behavior or and i mean through the system not strange although you never know and we can't really interact in a in an unsafe environment so this format will perpetuate there so after realizing that we need to do something more a lot of agile thinkers around 2005 2006 started looking at how we can use what methods we can use to understand and collaborate on the work come together and they looked in the field of facilitation because they've been doing that for a long time so this format comes from facilitation and it looks like this we start with an opening we start by saying this is what we're going to do and with focus we then have a bunch of divergent activities to choose from and these divergent activities help us to explore the information the insights and generate ideas about the topic so there are a number of activities that can fit into this frame section we then follow with convergent activity so we've generated some ideas and insights through engaging activities and now we need to narrow the focus find what's valuable and practical and clarify the actions that are going out of there and then we close and look at the retrospective and say did that give us what we needed how could we do that better next time and if you are using the how many of you are familiar with the agile retrospectives spoke by Esther Diaby and Diana Larson all right very strongly recommend it was printed in 2006 that's eight years ago almost I think it came out middle of the year and the format that they set is to set the scene gather data generate insights decide what to do and close the retrospective so if you're familiar with that this is how it flows through the divergent convergent framework this format has been generating insights and improving software projects for a very long time eight years and more the books obviously come after the ideas right and that has helped software to improve significantly and there are lots of different activities there's that book there's gene to bake his collaboration explained there are a huge amount of resources on the internet I think Ellen you said you have a site with similar things okay and I've got a website that is simply a curation of other people's ideas facilitating agility so and that will be at the end there's a lot of information on the internet we've been doing this for a while it's giving us a lot of good info after six to six months to a year of doing this teams get very good at the feeling of continuous improvement getting better at what we do after two or three years pretty much cleaned out those cobwebs re-architected those buggy areas got to the point where we understand our requirements so much better we're in tune with ourselves and we know how to get on with each other at this point teams start saying well why are we bothering to retrospect we had a nice sprint continuous improvement means getting beyond that level of good so I'd like to suggest that one way of doing that one way of moving beyond we've got to that level of good is to start using the retrospective to create our stories if the first section tells us what our stories are the second type helped us to really understand our stories and to interact with them now let's look at creating the stories we want to be playing in and what I suggest for that is of course play remember how play is that activity by which we entertain new ideas and combine new things in different ways in the safe to fail environment retrospectives if we start to introduce activities within the retrospective that we can play around with turn it into a tinkering space and that before we get into anything creative if you take things from systems thinking complexity thinking lean innovation and start introducing those in the retrospective space we're upping our level of knowledge that alone is going to help us without feeling like we are working within our sprint and we have to get this goal right within the retrospective we can just play another personal bug bearer of mine why is it called a retrospective any ideas that's what it means yes it's looking back I suspect it's called that because norm curse wrote a book called project retrospectives and it's stuck and he was looking back so that's good why do we want to look back to move forward yet but why do we look back to see what went wrong so that we don't repeat it to see what went wrong that is a very nice description what she said was we're expecting in the future it will look the same as the past so we're going to deal with that which is the wrong assumption okay we believe that's where the data is it's the things that we can fairly reliably say are true are in the past because we are retrospectively coherent but our memories are a bit funny so we sometimes actually misremember things I'd like to suggest and this is something I've been doing with my teams for a while oh before I suggest that this is the agile principle that governs retrospectives and how many of you are familiar with the principles behind the agile manifesto they're 12 of them right this happens to be the 12th one they're not numbered but it always comes at the end so the principle is at regular intervals the team reflects on how to become more effective than tunes and adjustments behavior accordingly where is time in this statement regularly yes there's a heartbeat but where does it say looking back by the one more effective you can say so let's think about reflect what does that tell us simply the present if we look in the mirror we can see what data we have around us but at the end of the day when we're in that daydreaming space we're reflecting on our lives it's past present and future when we're being creative there is no sense of time so I'd like to suggest what we make the future our focus if we stop looking back in the west the left is the past we stop looking back at the problems that we've had and the things we're trying to get away from and start looking to the future where our possibilities lie where our options lie where we can start putting in place plans to hold off the troubles we imagine to get us stronger there and to put in place skills and practices that will help us maximize and leverage the opportunities we believe are there so what would that look like I have a small medium and large and the simple of the not too much of a mind bend little bit of a mind bend and let's get creative so the first off is make your bets explicit you know how we write goals at the end of each retrospective and we kind of say we hope we're going to do this it's a little bit we bet that if we make this improvement when we do this action we will receive this benefit let's make it explicit so write a goal hypothesis how many of you were in jesus talked just before this one right he's also talking about hypotheses write a goal hypothesis by implementing our goal for example writing a test harness we expect this result we expect to catch bugs earlier we expect to catch them before we release them what we'll see if we're right so those are the past conditions and what we'll see if we're wrong the fail if we're right then when we write the test harness we will probably be fixing more bugs in sprint it will probably take us a little bit longer on the other hand we'll probably have a happy tea a happy client where did that one come from and if we're wrong well we will build a test harness but perhaps the bugs are coming in from a different place than where we tested maybe it's data coming through a different pipe and maybe our client continues to be unhappy at that point okay this is visualizing what will happen if we implement our goal it's looking into the future to imagine what it looks like and the best part is this is science so the engineers amongst you who are suspicious about creative stuff can go back to your teams and say this is the scientific method we can do it it's okay so first level make your basic explicit write the whole goal hypothesis the next level is to actively imagine the future remember that how imagining that future is creative in itself and there are two specific exercises around this which have been doing the rounds for a while the one is to imagine you get to the end of your sprint or you end of your release and the most wonderful things has happened it's the best project you have ever been on the customer was happy there were happy coincidences we had the right skills at the right time what did that look like what were the happy coincidences similarly you get to the end of the sprint who you're retrospective and everything went wrong it was hellfire we we never want to be there again everything is burning what happened what did that look like so we first off and remember if you're going to do this first off don't do those together don't remember that i haven't told you don't do them together but remember that positive thinking is hard when you've already started thinking negatively so don't do them together but try to do the positive one first because the negative one is going to shut down our thinking about alternate solutions it will help us focus on problem solution so the questions for each of these are what could we do to make this happen in each of them how could we make sure we have serendipitous connections you're kidding me Cara we can't predict the future but we can imagine it and once we've imagined it we can handle what we imagine similarly what would have happened what would we have done in order for us to have everything on fire we didn't write a test harness ah check let's write a test harness how can we prepare what are the steps we need to put in place to make sure that we can leverage the opportunities and take care of the risks that we're facing so that when we get there our future is different than it would have been if we hadn't thought about it just by doing this our future is different already and then if we get there and it happens we're ready to act or if we get there and something else happens i would say 75 chance you'll get there and something else has happened because you're prepared in the first place and because we can't predict the future we're already in the framework of thinking how do we handle this problem so we can act very creatively and very responsively this is what builds team resilience yeah any questions on this one anybody tried these exercises one two three four five okay small group mark three getting really creative if we start to introduce in our retrospective processes our retrospective format the ideating process we start to generate ideas that didn't exist before how do we do that we need a slightly different framework for that so i'm calling it a creative thinking format and it follows the same sort of structure we need to start with an opening then for our divergent exercise we need we will be ideating this is generating new ideas that you hadn't had before you started ideating at that point it's too early to go straight into convergence we need to have a small selection criteria by which we pick the best of the ideas we're not ready to converge but we can pick them according to most possibility or what we have most passion about and then follow a second divergent activity that is an elaboration of the ideas that we've picked followed by a convergence which is evaluating what we are the ideas that we've generated and then a close again review how we are how that process works for us and how we can improve so what does that look like these are some of the activities that you can put inside this i like to use improv as the opening exercise it's a nice way of loosening up the mind improv exercises for the ideating phase these are three ideas there's idea tunes false faces and false connections these ideas come from thinker toys and from edward debonos how to have creative ideas and i'm going to walk you through some one of each of these followed by ways in which we can elaborate body storming is an elaboration process prototyping is an elaboration process something like a graphic plan you might want to put lean canvas in here we're trying to get more data about what we're doing followed by an evaluation process ritual descent feasibility mrs idio's way of looking at it and another one called safe bolt that's a checklist or some criteria that we wear up against followed by a review i'm going to walk you through these ones improv and so what i like about improv is that they're based around stories and the thinking behind it is accept and build is anybody here familiar with the improv exercise yes and a few of you care so what happens there is one person starts a conversation and the next person may not reject you have to accept so you can't say well no that's ridiculous yes and build on that so one of the ways of doing that you can do that simply as a conversation you can have somebody just go on the team a couple of times building on that and you can follow it with yes but and see the difference because yes but you can feel really hard negative negativity leads you to smaller stories what you can do is take a set of words that i've printed these out of the sinker toys books they're already association rich words and each of the team members gets a word and then start a sentence with their word the next person follows with yes and there was a flamingo yes and it was giving a politician a sense of flamingo in the city it was giving the politician a lot of trouble yes and that was because he kept ringing the doorbell yes and the landlord was getting and this gets really silly really fast do you remember that thing about laughter everybody relaxes it's a lot of fun and initially there are skeptics i promise you three times you've done this and i've only had one person in all the teams i've ever worked with still reject the idea we like these another option is improv drawing so if you take a little piece of paper that just has a line on it a squiggle and give it to the team members and ask them to draw something sometimes i frame it what was the last sprint like you can see there was a lot of variety in this feedback an a plus and a hang man and we started talking about different perspectives but this comes from something called a torrents framework for creativity is a torrents test i'm not sure how i feel in fact i'm very clear about how i feel about testing creativity nonetheless i think this is useful that you just give it to people and you don't give them a framework and see what they come up with it's useful to have something to start with a point of reference if you give people a blank paper it's hard for them to focus all right so ideating is the space we we generate ideas we've never had before and so there's i'm going to talk through idea tunes and i do have time to talk through the false faces one as well false connection is another one you can google these they are out there you can get the books they are lovely and you will make the authors happier and i'm not one of them so idea tunes you start by stating the challenge we always when we start ideating need to have some frame of reference we need to have a focus state the challenge clearly then this one goes then we list the attributes of that challenge and draw symbols that represent those attributes and then experiment with a combination of the symbols so this particular exercise i did with a team simply as a creative thinking exercise so this wasn't to solve a specific problem it's to learn how to get to generating ideas so the challenge was we need more ice cream the attributes that the team came up with were hungry sweet delivery urgency love packaging and cold so you've got need ice cream etc the images that came with that so you can see hungry sweet delivery urgency love packaging and cold if i didn't have the words there they probably wouldn't mean anything to you so you write them on the back and then you experiment for combinations you pull the words around the ideas around and we had delivery and love send ice cream to a loved one and ice cream delivery service okay sweet cold and packaging the words verbatim were sweet mix that you mix and freeze instantly instant ice cream so these were ideas that had not occurred to anybody before we did the opening exercise even after the opening exercise what's wonderful about this sort of exercise is it generates some people the belief that they can each of them individually have creative ideas which is knocked out of us when we're children which i do not understand and sure is wrong we can bring it back okay rah rah so i don't have pictures for this one so it's a little bit more boring this is one that a very ordinary team faced so the challenge is and i apologize for small writing for the people at the back um so the challenge is that the client reprioritizes then loses touch with planning anybody had this problem before okay list the assumptions well we had about five i'm giving you these two prioritizing new work delays planned work we assume that when we prioritize new work the plan work gets pushed on the pipe we also assume that we send a build twice per sprint this team is working on a desktop application so it's not a web application for a client who would then distribute it um we now the next step is to reverse right in the negative the assumptions very literally right in the negative so don't try and reword it we don't send a build twice per sprint how could the reverse how could the will be different in order for the reverse to be true well i suppose we could and this this part takes a little bit of time a little bit of wrapping your head around we could only send one build per sprint then that would fill that we could send multiple builds per sprint it could spend send many this and we are generated ideas across all of these this one i'm showing you uh because it really is breakthrough for this team they cannot the client has no capacity to build on build from their side it's never been considered in the team but we've been doing enough creative thinking for the guys to go oh outside the box something like um having smarties delivered on your lawn i was using them at the example something completely outside of this world so outside of their world was the ability for the client to upload build on demand if we just upload changes to a central server we couldn't act on this one it didn't matter because what happened along the way is we firstly we've generated the idea it is now simmering within the team but we also surfaced another hidden assumption and that was that our sprint length is three weeks but if we change our sprint length and send one build per sprint then we have a much better control over what the client is expecting now this that might not feel to any of you like it's breakthrough thinking the difference being that when i started working with the team they were very full of the things they couldn't do they can't do this because the client says that and the client wants two builds per week and we've made all sorts of adjustments around what the client wants and now they are confident and comfortable and when we fed back to the client they're like oh well if that's why you want it we can change that it made a difference and it gave the team an enormous sense of pride any questions about this one before i move on okay so in elaboration techniques this is where we try the ideas out and i'm going to talk through body storming prototyping graphic game plan lean canvas will fill in here you can kind of go right but what do we need in order to fill those sections body storming looks a little bit like this in fact it looks a lot like this has anybody heard of body storming here or tried it out this is a lot of fun this generates laughter what we do is it's called for the smart people a smart word when you want to sell it to the buses experiential prototyping that is something that makes sense retrospectively and it makes no sense initially what you do is you act out an interaction with the product body storming is often described as a brainstorming activity it's not really brainstorming is generating ideas that weren't there before body storming is validating i've got an idea how do i want what would they look like well i need a page that scrolls i mean you get somebody going okay well i'm scrolling for you i need more information scroll up oh there's an assumption that there's more information underneath and it's radically silly what it does as you go along is it surfaces tacit assumptions things that we would kind of go of course we need this data but we don't think about where it might go and we catch them on a whiteboard or a flip chart very quickly as we go so this one is for a mobile gateway i'm not gateway a mobile payment process that you could use while driving around the countryside and as we went along we realized we had to think about what about refunds do we need Wi-Fi connections are they transaction fees and you can see towards the bottom towards the end we're getting like really excited and writing things down and running back and trying them out again we go step through it works a lot like a customer experience journey we step through and by a half hour exercise have a very clear visual idea about what that idea might look like and what we need to do to put that in place a good elaboration technique will help you clear up what the important questions are what the obvious ones are and what do we still need to know and if that makes a valid idea or not which then allows us to evaluate it in a good way so there are various formats for evaluating the idiom format i'll show you safe bold as well ritual dissenting play the critic i want to talk about after i've shown you the idiom format is very simple it ranks in a venn diagram your product desirability the technical feasibility and the business viability you can see this group were very optimistic about all their ideas they were all technically feasible um so it might need another layer of evaluation after this but you kind of place well if this one if these ones don't really have business viability let's not look at them first let's focus and it's a good reduction technique safe bold is a it's a checklist type so down the left hand side is safe and down there are witches and down right is bold each level is scaled and how much workable or how much we know about it innovation and difficulty so there's small big achievable are performing oh i'm sorry following leading edge and so on so these checklists there are multiple checklists that you can use but this is a nice format to rank right from this i know whether i want a more innovative but it's more difficult well then it has a certain set of constraints we need to focus on it's less innovative but it's quicker to market but it's got different constraints we need to focus on so it's an evaluation technique things ritual descent is an activity that looks at playing the critic are taking an idea and saying okay what's wrong with it in any brainstorming technique you want to leave us right to the end and use the format it's Dave Snowden's format of moving from table to table anonymously so the idea is the thing that is addressed not the person criticism is something that we take very personally and it stops us thinking it creates a threat response in us but when you remove the criticism from a person and focus on what's wrong with this idea we can really build on solving what's wrong and get better ideas this would be a good exercise to do to validate something before you bring it into the lean canvas i think okay so that's the creative thinking format we open ideate select validate evaluation review retrospective 3.0 they focus on play rather than problems focus on future rather than the past and they focus on ideating rather than analyzing to read more these are the books i strongly recommend again they will be up so anybody have any questions we have plenty of time for some questions i'm going to let you think about that because i'm sure they're one or two as i go through teams who think creatively they have a practical play structure and what's important about play we can call it tinkering and we can call it play when we don't have to pretend we're serious about our work when we know we're serious about our work and we know we need to be creative in order to get the work done and not serious about ourselves in a motivating environment that supports creative thinking with these three elements in place creative teams create their own futures i'd like to give a special thanks to Linda rising whose talks last year at this conference were really inspirational for me and got me working on the talk her book is fearless change patterns for introducing new ideas so i strongly recommend that one okay i'll leave you with that one last thought and my references questions yes so what i do in the retrospectives is i mix up the activities i very seldom do the full one end to end and i'll focus on where i think the teams needs to kind of exercise that type of thinking sometimes we'll spend longer on the validating process and sometimes we'll spend longer on the ideating process is that what you're asking me oh i see no not really it's so every team is unique and every sprint is unique so based on the sprint that's happened i'll work in an activity obviously i'm not going to repeat the same one over and over i don't think i've ever repeated a retrospective in my life sometimes i repeat the patterns thank you yes that's happened it depends on where the team is but i don't i'm not like heart i'm i'm i'm not gentle in the introduction of like slowly putting my way in um a couple of the i i generally start with the opening exercise because then we can get into the analysis quickly and people feel okay about it but we started the idea seeded the idea that we're going to get creative and when we get creative and later exercises familiar to them um but people are much stronger than you think and people have a much greater desire to exercise their creativity than we give them credit for and it's it's kind of worked out of us there's a fear barrier and i have found that once you cross that fear barrier by being somebody who's facilitating this in a retrospective which you kind of need to be at but you also need to want to be at that barrier is much more easily broken anything else yes i've been conducting retrospectives for my team since one year now and we started off when initially the team was coming up with more pain areas and we used to come up with experiments to get over those areas right but now we have reached a point where like we used to keynotes green is for positive whereas for negative so now it's dominated by green so it motivates the team but then they stop thinking beyond what how we can improve ourselves and uh as i'm i'm playing for scrum master in the team i do not try to influence them a lot i want them to find out the problems and them to come up with the solutions and experiments yes so many a times we reach a point where there is hardly any red sticky on the board and then we don't have a purpose for the meeting oh no there's nothing to fix so but but but i know that there are a few areas over there but i do not want to push that that's right so so what's nice about that second format the um process of generating insights gathering data are you using that the agile retrospectives format so uh yeah they're using that it's not it's similar to that but do you repeat exactly the same retrospective each time play use the retrospective to if you feel that the so first off sometimes when there's a problem with a team that you can see clearly from the outside like a three week sprint is usually an anti pattern if you tell the team go to two weeks it's not their idea and they haven't brought in and it's because there's something else it's a symptom the thing that you can see from the outside is a symptom and there are other problems that the team knows so you can't tell them this is your problem go and fix it you can analyze and get inside what all is going on and find the little pieces one by one by which you go okay well maybe that's the thing and if you use thinking from different i mean the wonderful thing about a software development is it is incredibly interesting lots of people have written lots of things from different perspectives there are many ways to look at our work so if you take things that come out of lean or systems thinking or innovation thinking and you build those into the retrospectives so that you give teams a working knowledge of it it's like a training course but without them knowing about it or planning or having any attachment or fear about it get involved with the work that will surface so if you have an idea where a problem you think is you can build the retrospective in that direction but the team is still going to know what the right thing to address is. So are you also suggesting you should try out different retrospective techniques even? Yes. Because i've seen that probably they're getting bored of that same style. Yes definitely. You were very excited about it in the beginning because it was something new for them but remember how novelty is a thing that we pay attention to and we like novelty is lovely keep trying new things and the more you try new things the more you have to stretch yourself which is lovely too anything else before i wrap up yes so i can't answer that question from personal experience because i started with the like don't like ideas and for me it worked as a bridge from never looking back to working out what the data was i wouldn't go deeply creative initially because the team is so aware of the problems i don't think i've ever walked into a team that is very aware of everything that's right they're very aware of what's wrong and if you take the space which is supposed to be able for them to use to improve and you do something else i suspect you will lose trust because they need to fix these issues but every team is special and different so it you would need to use your intuition around that i don't believe in hard and fast rules they've they've troublesome okay all right okay oh one more question yes well i find that introducing things like improv in the beginning it really weirds people out at first why are we doing the strange thing just by seeding the creative thinking format gets them to start there's a little bit of laughter there's a little bit of discomfort and then the next time there's a little bit more laughter so for teams where there's a huge amount of anxiety you actually have to address that anxiety in order to hold their trust but at the same time you can introduce them to alternatives so things like a false spaces exercise that allows the team to pick what's wrong and then turn it around and then focus on ideating around that is incredibly useful because they still have it reduces the anxiety that we're not going to address the trouble and it starts to access their ability to think out the box does that help you i'd like to thank you all for staying for being part of the talk thank you