 We'd like to welcome David Horowitz. He's going to be talking to us about stop complaining and start learning We're really pleased that you've been able to join us. You're coming to us from the States today But early in the morning for you But we're pleased to have you with us. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm Both really pleased and also very frustrated I'm pleased because I'm here talking with all of you about one of my favorite subjects in the world retrospectives And I'm a bit frustrated because I was very much hoping to make my first trip to India back in March And so unfortunately, of course, that didn't happen and I'm here virtually But in any case just thrilled to be talking about one of my favorite things in the world, which is retrospectives So a little bit about myself before we dive in So I am the CEO and co-founder at Retrium a platform that helps you run better retrospectives So quite literally retrospectives are my day-to-day. We build software that has to do with retrospectives I think about them all the time And really it's one of the top loves of my life. I find them incredibly important and maybe only second to my family So I have a wife who I met when I was in my young 20s and four little kids Eight six four and one so I'm quite a busy guy and at any point in time because I'm home They could be running in through that office door over there and interrupt everything and I love when that happens I think it's great to incorporate them into my life and my work. So just word of warning. They may appear at any time But besides them retrospectives really are that important to me. So why? And that has a lot to do with the fact that I firmly believe that Retrospectives are the catalyst to the core of true agility. Why? Well, if you ask yourself, what is agile in just two words to me It would be very simple. Agile is continuous improvement. That's it Now many of us understand that intuitively when it comes to product development We make the product better over time Incrementally and iteratively over time, but when it comes to how do we communicate better together? How do we work better together? How do we have a better process so that we can deliver value faster? Then the question is well, how do we do that? And the retrospectives are the meeting that catalyzes that process In fact, if agile is about continuous improvement and you aren't running retrospectives or you aren't running effective retrospectives I would ask are you even really agile in the first place? So to me that's how core they are to everything we do as agile lists and I saw some people giving that little thumbs up icon I love the feedback one of the things when you're in person is I can feed off the audience and get a sense of engagement And it's much more difficult this way So please give me that feedback when you like what I'm saying so that I know that this is working for all of you All right, so if retrospectives are the catalyst of true agility, what are they? Let's start with the basics really quick before we get into a bit more of the detail So to me the definition of a retrospective is an opportunity for your team to reflect on what has occurred And to construct ways to become better going forward. They're very similar in many ways to postmortems Except that postmortems are run after the entire project or product is finished and quite literally the word postmortem means after death Which to me made no sense at all. Why wait till after death to improve? Why not improve during life? And that's where retrospectives come in The problem with retrospectives is that they are incredibly difficult to get right They suffer from what I call the vicious cycle of retrospective disillusionment That's a jumble of words and a mouthful, but I really love it So I'm going to say it again the vicious cycle of retrospective disillusionment and it goes something like this So you run a retrospective and everyone on your team shows up You have an interesting conversation and you come up with an action item that you want to work on in the upcoming iteration Or sprint everyone goes home for the weekend and comes back Monday morning And they start working on building out the user stories the product that they're supposed to be working on And completely forget about the fact that they had a action item from their retrospective Well now it comes time for the next retro at the end of the next sprint And the question is how engaged will people really be in that meeting? Well, most people if you're logical actually won't be very engaged in the meeting at all because if the last time You ran them it didn't lead to the continuous improvement that you're after then why logically speaking Why would you want to continue participating in a meeting that wasn't effective the first time? And so if you're not engaged in the next retrospective Of course, you'll have less of a commitment to follow through on the action item coming out of that retrospective And so on and so forth down this vicious cycle where lack of follow through leads to lack of engagement in the retrospective And lack of engagement in the retro leads to lack of follow through and you end up in this place Where no one believes in the power of retrospectives and then you either stop running them or you treat them as a checklist item Neither which of which is a good idea. So this whole talk is focused on how do we break that vicious cycle? How do we get ourselves out of that sense of this doesn't work? And therefore we'll stop being engaged in the meeting and into a much more positive Environment a much more positive mental state where we believe in the power of retros because they are working for us So that's what we're trying to accomplish in this talk To do that, I like to say that effective retrospectives rely on a triangle of success three things The first is people the second is facilitation and the third is follow through What I mean by that is you have to get the right people in the room to have a good conversation You have to facilitate the conversation so that you're talking about the right things And then you have to follow through on the action items you come up with in order to get the continuous improvement You're after what makes retrospectives so incredibly difficult Is that if any one of those three things in your retrospective triangle of success is messed up if you lose that one You will likely fail just to give a concrete example there Imagine you got the right people in the room But you didn't facilitate the meeting in an effective way Then likely what will happen is the person who's most outgoing in the room will speak up first And whatever that person wants to talk about is what will be discussed And so even though you might follow through on an action item It might not be the right topic of conversation with the right action item because it wasn't an effectively facilitated meeting Or to give one more example Suppose you don't have the right people in the room, but you facilitate the meeting and you follow through on it Well, if you didn't have the right people in the first place Will the team really be committed to the action item or maybe you won't be able to come up with a commitment Because you didn't have the person in the room who would be the one who could follow through So and if you remove any one of these three things you lose and that's what makes it really really difficult So when we dive into how to break the vicious cycle of retrospective disillusionment We're going to talk about each one of these things. How do you get the right people in the room? How do you facilitate an effective retro and how do you increase the odds? You will actually follow through on the retrospective action item because I know for so many of us That's where things fall apart. So let's go and dive in Let's start with people The rule number one with people and this sounds simple and trivial But perhaps is a bit not as trivial as you might expect when you dive in It's that retrospectives are for the team. So then it begs the question. Who is on the team? Well, first of all, it's not your boss Your team is not your stakeholders. Your team is not even your agile coach. It's for the team So if you look at the scrum guide, you get a very clear answer of what defines the team Um, and let's back up just for a moment and talk about where we get that from the scrum guide So the scrum guide, this is a quote from it says the sprint retrospective Is an opportunity for the scrum team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next sprint So that's where we know that retrospectives are for the team So who's on the team according to the scrum guide? It's three individuals the scrum master the product owner and the development team the people who are actually doing all that work That's who should be in the retrospective Which is a interesting thing because so many times I'll get a question like should I invite my product owner to the retrospective? And of course, maybe there's edge cases where that might not be a wise idea But in general you've got to invite the whole team to have an effective conversation In fact, I like to say that if you don't want to invite the product owner, then your team has some Body odor says don't want to invite the p.o. You've got some b.o Because if you think about a developer the developer might be familiar with the um term code smell I don't know if any of you have ever heard of that before But if you're an engineer or no engineers, you've likely come across the term A code smell is just something feels a little fishy in the code I don't know exactly what it is But something just is off here somewhere and we need to find out what it is Well, similarly, I like to say this is a retrospective smell If you don't want to invite anyone on your team any single individual on your team You have a little bit of a retrospective smell That's worth diving into because you really need all those people there to have an effective conversation With that said rule number two is completely ignore everything I just said ignore rule number one And that's because of the Pareto principle the 80 20 rule that 80 percent of the time that's true But 20 percent of the time it might not be Your boss your stakeholders your agile coach Maybe they're the ones who should be in in the retrospective The thing is it should be up to your team if your team collectively and democratically voluntarily invites these individuals into the retro Thumbs up it is perfectly fine for you to have those people in the room But only when they're invited The smell comes when your boss says I need to be there with you or your stakeholder says I need to be in that room in the retrospective because of paramount importance to the retrospective is psychological safety And if the people in the room don't feel safe because someone outside the team is with them in the retro They won't talk about what's important. Anyway, they won't open up and be honest And then what's the point of the conversation? So 80 20 80 percent of the time just the people on your team But 20 percent of the time it's okay. Invite anyone you need to have an effective conversation Okay, rule number three about people in the room is that you need a facilitator again This seems so simple and obvious, but there's a lot of people who would push back against this concept Stereotypically and I can say this of course because I used to be a software developer for many years I wrote code for about 10 years So I am very knowledgeable of what it feels like to be on the engineer and development side because I lived it You might say well, that's that's kind of silly. We can just talk about things Why do we need the soft skills of a facilitator? Well, let's go through a couple examples of why that's important Imagine there's low participation in the retrospective. Does anyone have give me the thumbs up icon if anyone experiences this in their retro Where there's low participation people just don't seem that engaged. Yeah, I can see all these thumbs up coming in right people stay quiet And so you have to ask yourself. Well, why why are people not speaking up? And if you don't have a facilitator, then there's no one to know how to handle that situation So a trained facilitator might for example, try a new retrospective activity. They might take a break They might shift to breakout groups because sometimes some people feel comfortable in large group settings And other people feel much more comfortable in a one-on-one type conversation So you could do breakout groups and then come back to the main group There's lots of ways of shifting the conversation to increase participation The best tip I can get give you is if you have low participation in your retrospective Don't assume that you should try any one of these three things. For example, don't assume that a new activity will fix it instead Run a retrospective specifically on why there's low participation Use five y's ask why again and again until you get to the root issue of why people aren't participating And then you can find a solution to the problem. Otherwise, it's just throwing darts at the wall Okay, here's another example of why a facilitator can help Sometimes you'll be talking about something but really you're not you're talking about many things at once Different people are talking about different things or there might be a perception that we're talking about one thing when The engineer over here is talking about x and the the ui person is talking about y So how do you handle that without a facilitator? It's unclear, but a trained facilitator can do things like create a parking lot where you have a poster board or a white board somewhere and you just put up ideas that we can come back to later You could name the different topics say, okay You're talking about this thing and you're talking about something else Let's name them and come back to them later. Now we have a way to refer to them There's different ways that facilitators can handle this problem So I could go on and on with the different situations that a facilitator a trained facilitator knows how to handle My point is you need one. So the next question is well who? By default everyone seems to assume it's the scrum master or maybe the agile coach thumbs up if that's you Everyone on your team your team is always facilitating these retros with the scrum master agile coach and by default That's probably a good idea, but it doesn't always have to be that individual There's no rule anywhere that says that it has to be the scrum master So changing who facilitates not just the scrum master agile coach But anyone on the team has three distinct advantages The first one is it keeps things fresh, right? So I've been facilitating retrospectives for many many years But despite that I only have a certain set of facilitation techniques that I am very comfortable using It's quite a few, but there's only a certain set if I bring someone else into the room to facilitate They might have a whole new way of facilitating that's never occurred to me So bringing someone else into the room to facilitate the retro provides fresh ideas to keep the retrospective interesting and engaging furthermore Facilitating in different ways helps people think think think about things in different ways So broadly speaking there are two types of retrospectives out there There's the the retrospective on the top left that you see which is the lego retrospective It's the creative retrospective where you might draw something that represents how you're feeling about the sprint You might if you're distributed use an animated gift to represent how the retrospective went for example It's creative things you can use legos to build a little figurines of how things are going and certain types of people really resonate with that sort of retrospective And then there's the other type of retro which is very data focused. It's very analytical It's looking at the data to say with this in mind. What should we do next based on the actual hard facts coming out of the sprint? Different people resonate with different types of retros and different facilitators are really good at different types of retros So make sure you bring people in who know how to facilitate these in different ways to engage different people in the room Okay, the second thing is that it increases your bus factor thumbs up if you've heard of bus factor before know what it is Okay, I'm getting a couple of thumbs up. So the bus factor Is the total number of people who would have to be hit by a bus in order to leave your project for dead? And a lot of times people think of this in terms of you know, the star engineer The person who just knows how the code works and can come in at 11 o'clock at night and fix something by 11 30 Because they just know it they're the star, right? And if that person was hit by a bus Your project would be left for dead because no one else knows what to do But in my mind because of the central importance of retrospectives It's actually true for you as well as a facilitator if you're the only one who knows how to facilitate a retro on your team Because if retros really are the engine the catalyst of agility if the facilitators can't facilitate anymore What are you going to do next? So spreading the the knowledge of facilitation is a great way of increasing your bus factor And then the last one is it gives everyone a chance to participate if you're facilitating You really shouldn't be participating in the same retro. It's hard It's very hard to be both a facilitator and a participant at the same time But that's a problem because if you remember one of the things I said very early on The scrum master is part of the team They're a member of the team and so if they're the ones facilitating Then they shouldn't be participating But they likely have valuable things to contribute because they're on the team And so if you can't do both what gives by changing who facilitates across time You're giving everyone a chance to participate in these retrospectives at various intervals and that's very helpful So that leads into what I just mentioned, which is facilitate or participate choose one You really can't do both at the same time I was actually talking to one of the world's most experienced Retrospective facilitators out there and she was saying that even she struggles to try to facilitate and participate in the same meeting It's not possible for her. Well, if it's not possible for her for all of us mortals It's not going to be possible either. You have to choose one So the only way that I have found to be A catalyst of facilitating and participating in the same meeting is by wearing a physical hat What I mean by that is I will wear a hat that says facilitator on it when I'm facilitating the meeting And the moment I want to participate in the meeting I'll take that hat off so that everyone knows I'm not the facilitator anymore I'm now the participant and that's important because as a facilitator you're supposed to remain neutral You're supposed to give everyone in the room a chance to speak up and share their thoughts By taking that hat off and saying I'm now a participant everyone knows you're not neutral anymore Now you're going to be contributing your ideas and have perhaps strong opinions Okay rule number five and this is the last one in the people bucket the people part of the triangle of success If one person is remote everyone is remote Now this used to be a shocking statement back in the pre-covid era when I would give conference talks people would say There's an audible gasp. What is the how is that possible if one person's remote? We still have a co-located team It's not that shocking anymore I think everyone now is more empathetic on average with the fact that remote team members are people too And deserve an equal voice in the room So if anyone is remote on your team the entire team is remote now. What's the implication of that? I'm going to skip a few of these slides When it comes to retrospectives Let's think about if you're co-located you wouldn't just have a conversation around a table What you would do if you were co-located is you'd have flip charts and sticky notes and markers and different ways of Engaging people through physical items, right? And so if you're distributed it also is true that you need to reproduce those types of environments But for your remote teams So you can't just have a video call and call it a retrospective. You should use some physical Digital tool that represents the physical world now all the way on the left You have tools that are just general purpose collaboration tools things like google docs Things like real-time board, which is now Miro and others that really it's just an open space to play but it gives you a visual manifestation of the physical world For your remote team and that can help engage people and then all the way on the right You have tools that are more specific to retrospectives that have pre-built facilitation techniques For example, if you want to run lean coffee and you are a remote team How would you do it? It would be quite difficult unless you had a tool that supported lean coffee out of the box So that's where tools like ours retrium and group map and others come in Pick your poison. I'm not here to sell anything I'm just trying to give you a sense that you have to use a tool of some sort to engage people in your retro Otherwise, uh, you're going to end up with just a conversation, which you wouldn't do if you were in person Right, so make sure that you don't fall into that trap Okay to recap the people part of the triangle of success rule one retros are for the team But rule two is that use the Pareto principle? That's only 80 20 true 20 of the time invite whoever you want in to make sure you have the best conversation that is you need to have Rule three is use a facilitator Rule four is facilitate or participate choose one and rule five is if one person is remote Everyone is remote make sure that everyone has a chance to be engaged All right, let's move on now to the second part of the triangle, which is the facilitation part So let's go through the rules of facilitation Simple shocking statement use facilitation techniques. Let me give you an example So when I was running this conference talk at a previous conference when I was in person pre-covid I actually ran a real retrospective on the conference in the the conference talk itself And we had something like I don't know 300 people in the room And I said so how's the conference going? And I just stopped talking and I let everyone sit there awkwardly thinking well Does he want us to actually respond or is this just what what's going on? And the point that I was trying to make was that if you don't facilitate you just open the question How are things going you're going to get awkward silence in your retrospective too So don't do that. You need facilitation techniques. So I'm going to keep going here to this slide This thumbs up if you've seen this before interesting, okay So you know how in talks sometimes people say all right here comes some some thumbs up excellent Um, if there's one thing to take away from a conference talk, you know how people say this This is what it is. So for me, that's this slide This comes straight out of Diana Larson and Esther Derby's book on agile retrospectives If you're interested in retros and by default I assume you are because you're here and you haven't read this book Please do yourself a good service and go to go to your local bookstore amazon or wherever and go buy this book It's kind of the the foundation of everything else. We know to be true about agile retrospectives So in the interest of time, I'm going to breeze through this I don't I usually go into more detail, but I don't have enough time to do that today So there are five phases to an effective retro according to Diana and Esther. There's set the stage There's gather data. There's generate insights. There's decide what to do and there's close the retro Set the stage is a way to engage the audience It's a way to make sure that people speak up once at the beginning of the meeting Because there's actually a lot of research out there that shows that if you speak up once in a meeting You're more likely to speak up again So simply by doing something like hey one word everyone say how you're feeling right now And people might say sad or glad or frustrated or enthusiastic whatever the word might be simply by saying that one word The research shows that are more likely to speak up again So setting the stage takes two minutes, but don't skip it because you'll end up boosting your engagement and participation as a result All right, then the next stage is gather data Where so many of us say hey, what's going well? What's not going well? And that's our retrospective But it turns out that if you don't gather data first then it's very difficult to make sure that there's a shared understanding Of what actually happened in the sprint before you dive into what's going well and what's not for example You could just post up on the wall the burn down chart from the last sprint Or you could post up on the wall the list of bugs that were introduced in the last sprint Or you could ask everyone to build out a timeline to represent Exactly what happened in the sprint and x-axis is time everyone just puts up little sticky notes representing the events of the sprint So that you have a common set of data that then you can dive into analyzing when you move on to the next phase Which is generating insights So in generating insights after you've collected data, you're going to ask yourself Well, what's interesting about the data we just collected or what surprises us If you pick out something that is particularly interesting that you want to dive into I mentioned five y's before in the talk That's another uh facilitation technique that fits right into generating insights Five y's if you haven't heard of it, it's one of the more basic facilitation techniques that I really recommend you use frequently Which is if you identify a problem Don't jump right to action item because a lot of times if you do that you'll only be solving the surface level issues So instead you want to ask yourself why? Five times or however many times it doesn't have to be five until you get to the root cause of the issue that you're experiencing And once you found the root cause only then do you try to decide what to do to build an action item? Because now you're solving the real problems and not the surface level issue So that's an example of generating insights Deciding what to do is building an action item and then finally close the retrospective The easiest way to close the retro is to do what I like to do at every conference talk that I give Which is please everyone provide me feedback because I want to make sure I get better next time Well, if you're a retrospective facilitator you should ask for feedback from your team If there's low engagement in the room ask for tips on how to improve next time so that you don't make the same mistake twice Fantastic way to close the retro Okay, so that's basic facilitation when it comes to retrospectives Rule number two is to zoom in on the dog nose Which of course when you look at this you're probably wondering what in the world is this guy saying? Is it too early in the morning for him in the us? What does that mean? So let me describe what I'm talking about So there's this meme out there that was going around. I don't know a couple years ago Where there's said zoom in on the dog nose Right and so you'd say what in the world so you download the image and you'd You use your computer to zoom in on the dog nose And when you zoomed in if you since see it might be too small here for you still But there is a little bit of white on the dog's nose So you say, ah, man, I still can't read it. Let me dig in some more So you zoom in more and it says look in the bottom left corner Ah, okay, I just zoomed all the way in on the dog's nose What's going on? Let me zoom to the bottom left And so you'd go all the way to the bottom left corner of the dog and now it says look in the top right corner Man, what is this terrible meme? It's just going to go on forever And so you you keep zooming and panning until you get to the next thing and now on the top right. It says you are beautiful And so by zooming in on the dog nose you went from It's just a dog to a message a hidden message, which was you are beautiful I promise this is going to connect back to retrospectives in a minute, but let me give you one more example So many of you have probably seen the movie Finding Nemo I always forget. So I think they're looking for Nemo. I don't remember Who Dory or Dora, I think is the name of the fish anyhow I'm sure you've seen the movie and you know what I'm talking about So they're swimming nicely in the ocean right and you're kind of zoomed in on them and it looks like this great time But when you zoom out, um, you actually realize that they're about to get eaten by this large shark And so that's a little scary, right? So by zooming in or zooming out you change your perspective On the situation. So what does that have to do with retrospectives? So many of us run retrospectives that are zoomed out, right? So they're this one They're the the shark with the fish picture and we do that when we say what went well What didn't go well or what is mad sad and glad right now? And when that happens, we just have this broad perspective on the sprint But there's another type of retro which is the zoomed in retrospective Where you talk about a specific topic and you dive deep on it instead of going broad So one way of doing that is using something called team radar A team radar just asks your team to rate themselves from one to five on different aspects of their work In this particular case, we have collaboration culture technical skills and expertise and other things And then you can average the results to build out this nice visualization that represents how your team's doing In this case, the blue line represents average and from this information We can very quickly at the beginning of a retrospective discover That this team is struggling the most on scope and schedules the lowest rated average So let's run a retrospective just on scope and schedule We've zoomed in on that narrow topic and guess what if we do that We should start to see improvement over time on that scope and schedule In fact, if we ran team radar again, maybe in a month or two If that's not better than 2.0 average that we're not doing our job in the retrospective Hopefully we're starting to see movement on that on that number Importantly, this is not a reporting tool. This is not to report to your boss to your manager This is internal to the team to judge your own progress so that you know if you're if you're improving or not So that's one way to zoom in on the dog knows All right rule number three is don't forget to facilitate open discussion So no matter what facilitation technique that you use Inevitably, you're going to end up in a situation where there's just talk people are just talking back and forth to each other There's a couple of things here that trained facilitators do really well Silence is your friend be comfortable with silence. Don't always keep talking and and filling the gaps sometimes silence is what will draw out ideas from people in the team Create invitations don't force things. So for example at the talking about this conference where I gave this talk I'll give you another example In front of 300 people. I said, hey everyone. All right if your name is mike or kim stand up And I was going out in a limb I didn't know if there would be anyone named mike or kim in the audience But sure enough about four or five people stood up And so they were wondering what is going on here And then I said, hey now dance And there's nervous laughter in the room and everyone was So mike and kim started dancing a little bit. I think one of them sat down. They said no way I'm not doing that in front of 300 people But the point I was trying to make is that I just forced people into an uncomfortable situation Which was not very nice of me But it's the same thing in a retrospective if someone's being quiet and you say to them Hey, patricia, what do you have to think what do you have to say? That is putting them in the same situation that I put mike and kim in so instead create invitations Right, so you can say things like who else has an idea that's creating an invitation Or any comments from someone who hasn't spoken in a while. You're inviting people to participate instead of putting them in an awkward spot All right, and you can skip through a couple of these Um in the interest of time So the three things here are use facilitation techniques get familiar with diane and esther's book There is a whole set of facilitation techniques that are really useful Zoom in on the dog nose don't always have broad retrospectives Make sure you have focused retrospective sometimes too where there's a particular issue you need to drill into And don't forget to facilitate the open discussion once you end up an open discussion Don't let it be a free for all still use facilitation techniques to make sure people are engaged All right, let's move on to the last part of the triangle, which is follow through So this is where it gets really tricky because Imagine you have the right people in the room. Everyone was really engaged Use a proper facilitation technique to pick the right topic. You had an amazing deep conversation You found the root cause of the problem. You came up with an action item. You committed to that action item But then you don't follow through after the retro is over. Well, guess what you just wasted your time So your job is not done when the retro is over again one of the reasons why retrospectives are so incredibly difficult So what do we do about it? Here's some tips to encourage follow through after the retrospective is over The first one follow the energy All right, let's imagine you come up with an action item What are the variables if you're a math person? This will resonate with you What are the variables that impact the odds of success on that action item? Or what's the expected value of the ev of the action item? To me the expected value of an action item is a function of its impact Is this going to have a big impact or a small impact on your team? The effort it takes to actually do the action item, right? Is it going to take up the entire sprint or maybe just an hour of time? And then finally the most important one the odds you will actually do it So if imagine you have a very high impact action item that takes very low effort On the surface it sounds like that's a fantastic action item to commit to But if the odds are low that you will actually do anything about it in the sprint The effective value of the action item is big total zero because anything times zero is zero So if your team can't commit to something if they don't have energy to actually work on it It doesn't matter how big of an impact it will have and it doesn't matter how little effort it will take The expected value is zero So how do you take take that? Philosophical advice and turn it into practice So imagine you are dialing deep into a topic and you are trying to figure out what action item to take Well, you might ask your team. All right. Everyone brainstorm action items that might work for this problem We're experiencing and so the team will brainstorm and they'll come up with let's say five to ten action items So visually i'm going to list them up on my board here. That's what these yellow stickies represent I have a list of candidate or possible action items Then you'll say okay, everyone. Let's figure out. What is the impact? Of each of these action items and we can use relative t-shirt sizing. It doesn't have to be exact We're just trying to get a sense of relative to each other What's the impact of each of these things and so some will be large and some will be small and okay great Now we have a relative judge of impact Okay, let's judge effort t-shirt sizing some will be small some will be large right And if you look at this you might ask yourself, well, which is the right action item Which is the one that we want to commit to and so I can pretty easily scan through this list And see that their last one on the list has an extra large impact and an extra small effort sounds fantastic That's the one we should commit to But the next thing that we want to look at is energy And you'd ask people on your team put a dot Next to the action item that you Personally have the energy to work on in the upcoming sprint not that you think the team might work on Not that you think others might do but you personally can commit to having energy to work on And you if you end up seeing that the one that you thought had the highest impact in the lowest effort Actually, no one wants to work on as in this example That's probably not the right action item to focus on because the expected value is zero It won't get worked on instead the one that looks good here to me is the one with the highest energy people are excited about that Third one and so that's the one that will actually get worked on So we talked about the vicious cycle of retrospective disillusionment One of the best ways to break out of that is to start building a muscle memory Where you actually do what you say you're going to do and the best way to do that is to figure out Where do people want to be working? What do they want to do and if they want to be fixing something then fix it Don't worry about if it has lower impact or lower effort. That's the right one for you So this is a very practical facilitation technique that you can use to boost The odds of follow through in your retrospective All right rule number two is focus on one thing at a time This is very simple once you commit to an action item don't work on anymore stop the retro right there You have something you're going to work on as a team. That's good enough change is very hard for anyone I don't care how much you agree with continuous improvement or how much of a core principle of life that is to you As a as a homo sapien as a human it changes hard no matter who you are So only try to change one thing at a time and then stop call it a day and come back to the retro the next time and work on the next thing All right rule number three is to be smart. I probably everyone here has heard of the smart acronym for action items But it stands for specific measurable achievable relevant and time bound And basically all that saying is when you write your action item down Even if you have a lot of f of energy people really want to work on it It could be that there's two people have different interpretations of what actually the action item is And so by making sure when you write it down You are being specific and measurable and achievable and relevant and time bound You're ensuring that there's a shared understanding of what the action really is which will help Figure that out in advance of the sprint in the retro as opposed to waiting till later to discover that we had different interpretations Of what this thing really means So here are some examples of what that like might look like i'll just go through one of them The first one is We might say let's experiment with continuous integration as an action item which fantastic Let's do that but that's not a smart action item the way to write that in a smart way might be In order to release our product on a more frequent basis. That's the value We will set up a continuous integration server Before the end of the next sprint. That's the what and the when and we will know that we are successful when Commits to the code are automatically pushed to the continuous integration server The bold words there is almost a template that you can use to translate any action item into a smart action item So feel free to use that from the slides All right and rule four is that small wins are better than no wins at all so oops So has anyone here heard of 15 percent solutions thumbs up if you have it comes from Liberating structures, which is a wonderful set of facilitation techniques to engage the room feel free to go there It's liberating structures.com. It's all free on their website but the idea of 15 percent solutions is When you're trying to come up with an action item you might not be able to fix the entire problem Because maybe it's a big problem that your whole company's facing So reframe it to what's your 15 percent? What is the thing that you can do that will change just 15 percent of the problem? You won't fix everything but you'll fix a small part and sometimes that changes the people's mindset from one of I'm powerless and I can't fix this and I have no ability to change my working environment to Okay, I can't fix the overall problem, but I at least can fix some small aspect of it What is that so 15 percent solutions is a great way of doing it And then rule five is to use the modified vegas rule So many people have heard of the vegas rule what happens in vegas stays in vegas And I've heard from many people that that applies to retrospectives too So what happens in the retro stays in the retro and I actually vehemently disagree with that Now let me explain what I mean So it is very much true that you want to protect the psychological safety of the team in the retrospective And therefore by default everything that happens in the retro should stay in the retrospective But to me, that's not always the case The reason is let me go back to this one so the reason is imagine at the end of the retrospective you're talking about some really thorny tricky issue and You discover that we can't solve this at the team level, but if we could talk to The VP the VP could likely fix the problem Well, if you don't take that problem out of the team out of the retro and share it publicly with the VP it will never get fixed So what happens in the retro by default should stay in the retro But what I would do if I was facilitating is I'd open the retro by saying that Just so everyone knows what happens in the retro stays here. Please don't share anything publicly But at the end of the retrospective as the facilitator explicitly ask your team What out of everything that we just discussed? Should we share publicly and transparently with the rest of the company or with another individual? And if the answer is nothing that's perfectly fine But if the team from the bottom up voluntarily agrees that this thing should be shared Then share it you need to in fact share it with others so one Passive way of doing that without having to go to the VP if you might not feel comfortable with that Is to use what I call the retrospective radiator We all probably heard of information radiators This is a way of visualizing information like your burn down chart. So you know how you're doing Well, the retrospective radiator is a flip chart that you can hang in your team room digitally or or in person Where you put up things that the team has decided to share transparently with the org things like what did we learn in our retro or things that if you want to learn more about this Come talk to us. We're happy to share Or things like impediments that we're struggling with Imagine if it's not just you but every team in your org actually does this Then you'd get this view into all of the impediments that the entire org is struggling with Which if you're a VP that probably is really interesting to you because now you have this View into what are the problems that I should be aware of as a senior executive so that I can help fix them for you So the retrospective radiator is a great way of of pushing out information from the retro The rest of the company should know about But keep in mind it should be bottom up and volunteer. It's not everything goes on there It's just what the team explicitly says they want to put up on the radiator David you've got five minutes to go Perfect. I am pretty much done. I had to get through everything really quick. So Because of the time but all of that if you put all that into practice you get the right people in the room You facilitate the retro really really well and you end up with an action item that you can actually commit to and work on You will change the vicious cycle of retrospective disillusionment into a virtuous cycle of retrospective success Where retrospectives lead to a feeling of employees having a voice and engagement follows from that And the team starts to perform better and it ends up being this truly agile world that we're all after So i'm going to leave you with one slide which is that the type of device that I gave you today If it was helpful to you, um, I write things like this all the time and what I call the retrospectives academy Just scan that qr code or go to that url. It's all free You can just go to the website And there's lots of tips and tricks and we're in the process of writing a 12 chapter book a full length book That's free on the website. You can just take a look and and read all these types of tips and tricks And there's a lot more there too beyond what I talked about in the conference talk today So feel free to head on over And now I think I have five minutes left for q&a Thank you everybody Indeed you do and we have a quick few questions for you Any other has asked questioning a question on gathering data if we show the burn down won't the retro just We can find two problems in the burn down. Isn't that a little narrow approach? Yeah, so the burn down was an example of data that you could share You can certainly share any other data The burn down is one you could for example put the commit log into your git repository. How many commits did we have? you could put for example a A chart showing the amount of time we spent in different aspects of our work for example We were in meetings for 20 of the time this sprint We were heads down for 25 of the time and so on so you can analyze. Are we using our time? Well, so it's up to you what data to share One thing you could do is share lots of data and then have the team dial in on what seems to be most important But again, it goes back to that broad versus narrow concept the zoom in on the dog's nose concept So sometimes it's good to have a broad retro and other times It is really good to have a deep narrow retrospective based on just the burn down Part of being the scroll master is having an understanding of the impediments the team is facing and picking the right retro technique based on that feeling Wonderful. Wonderful. Next question is uh from Sucks, uh, Sucks G How can we get introverted people and agile teams to express their opinion more often in a retrospective? great, so uh Introverts and this is again near and dear to my heart because I don't know 15 years ago or so I classified myself as an introvert. I don't think of myself that way anymore But at the time I know what it felt like to be an introvert in a group meeting And so I know what I would have wanted and I also know through facilitating retrospectives I have some experience on how you can draw out their comments. So here's a couple ideas One is that introverts have wonderful things to share It's just that they don't necessarily on average feel comfortable sharing them in front of everyone verbally So the verbally part is really important if you include written communication in your retrospective it can Give an avenue for communication to retro to introverts that they otherwise wouldn't have So that's where sticky notes come in again digital ones are fine or in person physical sticky notes Just have them write something down that can really help Another thing that can help is to encourage people to add their ideas to the retrospective board Inline with the sprint. So in other words as they're working if they discover an impediment that they're struggling with Load up your your whiteboard or whatever you're using and write it down right then so that when it comes time to the retrospective You're not asking for people to think off the top of their head right then What should I share? In fact, you've given them two weeks to share those things in written form Inline with their work and that can really help introverts in participating I'll say one more thing which is that breakout groups can really help So a lot of introverts feel uncomfortable sharing in front of 15 people But if you say we're going to do one-on-one conversations and then report back in the one-on-one They're much more comfortable having a conversation. So alternating the how you facilitate can really help too all right, uh next question is from um Anaruda to a question on generating insights Yeah, uh using the five y's of each problem from each team member will take a lot of time So what's the recommendation? Do we use the five y's for all the problems or only the complex ones? Yeah, so five y's is particularly useful when you're trying to figure out the root cause of an issue Some issues don't need that type of analysis. It really is just a surface level issue But I've always been surprised by how many times you think it's a surface level issue when it's really something deeper going on So I recommend using techniques like five y's. It doesn't have to be that one There's another one called fishbone and many others that help you figure out root causes But yes, this does take time and that actually is the point that instead of trying to have a conversation about 20 different problems In a retrospective where each conversation is 30 seconds long and you finish and you don't really you didn't really talk about anything useful Focus on just one thing just the specific problem one time Once in the retrospective and have a very detailed conversation about it And you'll end up discovering an action item that is much more powerful and much more impactful for your team So yeah, it takes a while and that's a good thing in my mind Next question. How much time is ideal for conducting a successful retro? Do we need to keep it time boxed? So, um, yes, I would say time boxing is useful if nothing else than to keep people focused The amount of time it's a tricky one. You see all sorts of advice everywhere from one hour per one week of your sprint to many other things But I actually find that that doesn't matter what matters is you should take the amount of time You need to be effective in the conversation So I would start with let's say an hour for your retrospective And if that seems to be too long for your team then you can shorten it if it seems to be too short You can lengthen it use your brains as a team to figure out how long you need The point is that if the retrospective can turn into that engine of true learning and continuous Agility then you're going to want to spend as much time as you possibly need to to have that effective conversation So, um, you know start with that hour or so and just bend it change it depending on what you discover I don't find a hard and fast rule has been effective for me Well, we've got time just for maybe two more quick questions. Um, we used to do what this is from Rohit We used to do five wise exercise But eventually with time it turned into the blame game sort of thing How can we avoid this situation any tips to smoothly execute this exercise with the team? Yeah, so the blame game to me is can certainly be the result of five wise But the blame game can be the result of many different facilitation activities Um, and actually I should rephrase that it's not the result of facilitation The blame game is a result of a team dysfunction And your team won't descend into the blame game if the team is functioning at a high level together So, uh, how do you get out of the blame game? Um, there's actually a fantastic book. Do I have I think I actually have it here I don't know if you all can see but it's called the 15 commitments of conscious leadership So I'm reading this book right now. I I love it It's very different from any leadership or business book. I've ever read in fact I'm usually very skeptical of this type of book Because I find that people kind of just go on and on about things And it's not practical or it could have been a blog post, right? This is one of the one only ones that I've read in years that I found to be incredibly insightful in almost every page and one of the things it talks about is how You need to shift from a culture of blame to a culture of learning opportunity And I know that sounds obvious or it sounds um, like yeah, of course we need to do that But it gives you practical steps on how to actually transition from blame to learning Um, and so I can't I don't have time to get into all the details right now But if you're really interested in leveling up your skills there, I highly recommend that book. It's a really good one Again, just I'll put it one more time 15 commitments of conscious leadership Excellent. Okay. One last question before we have to wrap this up from People are asking more and more questions now Retro is often the skipped ceremony people lose faith over a period of time And it only happens just as a mandate any tips to overcome this Well, I hope that the talk helped with that though The entire point of the talk was getting out of that vicious cycle where it is a checklist item And people participate because they've been told that they have to or you just skip them and in fact It's it makes sense to skip the retrospective if you've been doing them for a long time and they aren't working right I'm not advocating to skip the retro. Believe me. I I love retrospectives. They're so core to who I am But if you keep doing them the same way And they're not working the the logical response if you can't figure out how to improve them is to not Do them anymore because it's a waste of time So people will just stop showing up or they don't pay attention They'll open their email and their laptops like this is a logical reaction So your job as a facilitator is to ask why What can we do next time to make this a better meeting for you? Don't the mistake that I see many times is people just keep doing the same thing again and again It's not working. That's okay. These retrospectives are just checklist item. I'll just run mad sad glad again next time And then the same thing happens next time and it just keeps going and everyone gets more and more frustrated So the whole talk was how to get out of that And I'm hopeful that some of those tips will help you