Author: Corinna Baldauf

[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]

Ahoy friend,

in my post about what I do while facilitating a retro, I said that I’m very hands-off as a facilitator. That doesn’t mean that I don’t influence where the conversation is going because I do ask questions and therein lies a lot of power. Let’s look at something I call “answer space”:

Answer space – The question shapes the direction of likely answers

One distinction you might know is the one between open and closed questions:

• Open: What could help you with that?
• Closed: Is there anything that could help you with that?

Which type you choose is one way to limit or broaden the answer space: The expected answer to a closed question is “yes” or “no”. The expected answer to an open question is some information or a story. In the example above “What could help you with that?” implies that there is at least one thing or person that can help. This implication makes it more likely that the other person will indeed come up with at least one thing.

You can use this deliberately: During the early stages of a retrospective we usually want to explore. Use powerful, open questions to invite a wide variety of answers.

In later stages, when we try to decide and wrap things up, closed questions are more helpful in narrowing things down and agreeing on actions.

But wait, there’s more! For example, you can influence people to look into their past or future:

• Past: What has helped you in the past in similar situations?
• Present: What could help you in the current situation?
• Future: What could help you in a similar situation in the future?

And we can focus on a problem versus an outcome:

• Problem: So, what’s the problem here?
• Topic / Neutral: Why did you come here today? 
• Outcome: What would you like to have happen?

A question is like a ray of light that you can direct. What you shine a light on, can be seen more clearly and take up more (head) space.

The question “What has changed?” has a rather broad answer space. Asking “What has improved?” limits the space of expected answers to positive points.

Obviously, the person you ask can also ignore the expectations behind your questions and answer outside of the intended space. They can answer the closed question “Do you have any plants?” with “Yes, a rubber tree and a small fern”. Or answer “What would you like to have happen?” with “Oh well, you know, that tracking system really is a pain in the butt”. But you can increase the odds of a certain type of answer. People are social beings that want to fulfill expectations. The chances of an answer inside your desired answer space are higher than of one outside of it.

Why is that important? How can we use this for good?

We can influence the energy levels with which people leave meetings run by us! And how much control they feel they have over a situation, and whether it’s worth it to attempt to change something at all. 

When we ask “into” problems and have them described, energy typically goes down. In contrast, when we ask for things that have worked in the past, or have people envision a bright future in great detail, people typically gain energy. And this energy booster makes it easier to take the steps towards that brighter future. Hope makes way it easier to get started than from a ditch of discouragement in a situation that seems unchangeable.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to steer clear of difficult topics, but rather that at the end of the retrospective I want people to feel that change for the better is possible. And that they are not at the very beginning of the process with lots of work still to do, but that they’ve already got contacts, skills and resources that can help them get there.

I ask questions whose answer space is in the upper two quadrants. I do it to focus the team on something that will give them energy (options) instead of leech it (all the ways things are shit) and on something they can change (the future) instead of something that is fixed (the past).

Are these leading questions, then? Ooof, not in the way that I’d understand a manipulative, suggestive question to be. What I mean is that while I pick my questions aiming for a helpful answer space, I do not have a specific answer in mind. I do not ask so that someone will suggest “more pairing” or “working agreement” or anything concrete like that.

If I want people to come to a specific conclusion I don’t ask. Instead, I offer it as a suggestion – that they can decline. I don’t play games where participants have to guess the “right” thing or where I’m disappointed and shrug my shoulders if they don’t guess what I’m hinting at.

As far as I’m aware of it, I don’t ask leading questions. But no matter what question you ask, you will influence the focus of your participants’ attention. And that is powerful. Use it for good!

If you’d like to know more about the kind of questions I ask, I go into a lot more detail in my free mini book “Asking for a Better Future”.

Take a minute:
Write down five questions that you typically ask during a retrospective. What answer space do they open up? What answers do you tend to get? Are you happy with the way these questions are working for you?

See you soon,

Corinna

PS: If you'd rather read this Guide as an ebook, click here. Or go all in and get it as part of the Retromat eBook Bundle at a discount. A purchase also supports Retromat as a whole 🙂

[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]

Hi beautiful!

Last week, we talked about why you might want to vary activities in a retrospective (or decide against it). 

This week, I present a concept from the 1960s that can help you pick activities that will support the current team mood. Bruce Tuckman posed that all newly formed teams go through similar stages, before they can perform well together:  

The original four stages are Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. Tuckman himself later added a final stage: Adjourning.

The stages are not strictly linear. Some teams skip a stage, others fluctuate e.g. because of changes in team membership, leadership, tasks, …

Much later (in the 2010s), Heidi Helfand suggested a stage between “Performing” and “Adjourning”. She called it “Stagnating”. This stage highlights the trade-off between keeping teams stable (you don’t have to go through the stages again) and too stable (no fresh ideas).

When I plan a retrospective, I find it useful to think about what is currently going on for the team and pick activities accordingly. Check out the free Retromat Quick Ref for pointers on which Tuckman stage an activity is well suited for. 

Important addition: Later research suggests that the stages are not as clear-cut as laid out by Tuckman. Instead, a team can be in several stages at the same time – the stage depends on the topic. So, they might be performing in writing code and still storming about how to best test this code. 

To me, the phases are still a useful model just more granular than previously thought. It comes in handy, especially when you want to devote a retrospective to a single topic. Consider the Tuckman stage for this topic. A team that’s storming needs very different support (help them share their perspectives and agree) from one that’s stagnating regarding this topic (shake things up). 

Take a minute:
What stages do you observe with your team for which topic?

So long and have a great week, 

Corinna

PS: Regarding storming and conflict in general: Conflict can be very productive and healthy as long as all involved respect each other. When I started out as a facilitator, facilitation was my main tool and I had a gut feeling about its limitations but I could not have put it into words. Luckily Glasl did it for me. Some situations cannot be helped by facilitation:

Check out Glasl’s Stages of Conflict Escalation to get a feeling for when facilitation and retrospectives can help and when they are doomed to fail and you need to bring reinforcements.

PS: If you'd rather read this Guide as an ebook, click here. Or go all in and get it as part of the Retromat eBook Bundle at a discount. A purchase also supports Retromat as a whole 🙂

[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]

Hello again!

Short recap of last week’s email: Retrospectives are only meaningful if they result in change, either by a better understanding of each other or experiments.

Experiments are either action items = concrete todos or rule changes = how the team handles their interactions, routines, rituals or events. Be warned, I’m sloppy and use the term “action item” to mean both types – yes, also in this email – and my recommendations apply to both types.

For me, a good action item is something that has a high chance of actually being implemented by the team. The team don’t get brownie points for coming up with ten action items. They get points for those two actions that they actually carry out and observe the results of.

Okay, let’s pretend that we are in a retrospective and the team is suggesting things to try out. What will increase the chances of follow-through for an action item? So glad, you’re asking! Strap in for my longform take:

9 properties of action items that make follow-through more likely

Small

Aim for small experiments. Go for the smallest change that could possibly make a difference. Small changes are easier to agree on. They have a higher chance of actually being implemented, because they are not such a big effort. If an experiment works: Great! If it doesn’t you haven’t invested much and can try something else. Rinse and repeat for continuous improvement.

Don’t underestimate the power of baby steps! Small changes quickly add up to big improvements. It’s like compound interest. Additionally, people experience that change is possible and gain momentum. Change is like a muscle: It gets easier with practice. Eventually bigger changes also become possible.

Concrete

Let’s assume, the team has a high-level goal such as “We want fewer failed stories”. There are many different ways to get closer to this goal. The team decides to go with limiting work in progress, e. g. “Work on fewer stories in parallel.” I would not be happy with this. How few is “fewer”?

How about: “We’ll work on at most 2 stories simultaneously”. Better. It’s easy to check whether or not the team is sticking to this.

In Control of the Team

Now it’s time to check if the goal and their strategy to reach the goal is within their control. In any given system there are

• parts that the team Controls
• parts that the team can Influence and
• parts that they can’t change. But they can Adapt to deal with them better

Make sure that the goal and strategy reflect where the team stands regarding “CIA”. It’s okay to pick a goal that they can only influence as long as their plan is about who and how to influence.

When you’re clear on that, ask them for the first step.

First Step

Few quotes have stuck with me as much as this one by James Clear (of “Atomic Habits” fame):

“Most people think they lack motivation when they really lack clarity.”

I know it’s spot on for me personally: if it’s too big or vague, I won’t even start. But if the first step is this one very specific thing? Well, this bit I can do. And then the next. And the next.

People often lose momentum, when they don’t know exactly how to start and it’s even truer for teams: If it’s unclear what the first step is, if it’s unclear what was actually meant by this two-word-action-item… momentum will falter before it was even really gained in the first place. 

For a to-do, make the first step as concrete as possible, e.g. if it’s about setting up a meeting clarify: Who is invited? How long will it be? When’s a good time for it? What’s the goal of the meeting?

For a rule change, spell out a concrete change in behavior – including what will trigger the behavior such as “During our daily standup, we’ll make sure that we work at most on 2 stories at the same time”.

Owner aka Responsible Person

Who is going to take care of this AI? Either by doing it themselves, by finding other people to implement it, or by reminding people. E.g.: “Timm will add the WIP-check to our standup-checklist”.

If there are no volunteers for an action item, then it might not important enough to the team (right now). Consider discarding it. Being explicit about not having the capacity or desire to do something is important information. Know thy (team)self.

If nobody volunteers, “What would have to change so that you would volunteer?” is an interesting follow-up question.

Review date

For todos, this is straightforward: until when will it be done?

Rule changes often need a longer period of time to see them in action, before you can review them. So how long will the team try a new rule? When the trial period is up, the team reviews the rule to see if it solved their problem.

Success criteria

How will the team know that they did the action item? And how will they know if they solved the problem or at least improved the situation? What are their success criteria? “Gut feeling” is an okay metric in my book as long as the team is explicit about it.

So far, all the points were for a single action item. The next one applies to the set of action items that come out of a retro:

One of Few

I once heard someone boast that they got 17 actions out of their last retro. They thought that that was a good thing. To me, it’s not. There’s a proverb “Those who hunt two rabbits will catch neither”. If you have too many goals you will reach fewer of them than if you had a small number to begin with and are able to focus. Out of a 60-90 minute retrospective we will typically get 2-3 action items. Anything more than 5 would make me very skeptical.

Last but not least:

Triggers and reminders

Sometimes teams think that they will just magically remember to do the action, without any specific reminders or system in place. When invariably in the next retro they find out that no, they didn’t (imagine my surprised pikachu face here) they sometimes still don’t wanna set up a mechanism. I’m baffled by this. Why do they think it will be different this time around?

William Larsen said something along the lines of “An action item is good if nobody has to become a better human to implement it”, meaning that nobody has to suddenly have perfect memory, become way more diligent or anything like that for the action to get done. 

That’s why I insist on setting up triggers and reminders that will make it more likely for the behavior to happen. Find a way to keep the experiments on everyone’s minds. Some ideas for visual reminders:

• Big AIs can become stories in the Sprint backlog
• Visualize 1-time-todos on the team board
• Have a running list of ongoing experiments
• Maintain a “Working Agreement” to list all current team rules
• Post checklists in the places you’re going to need them – e.g. the checklist for the daily standup goes on the task board

Triggers:

• Calendar events
• Slack reminders
• Add to checklists already in use
• Git commit hooks
• …

Add action items to boards and (digital) documents that the team already use on a daily basis.

Okay, to recap: Small, concrete, team has control over it, clear first step, responsible person, follow-up date, success criteria; there are only a few AIs, triggers & reminders

Let’s revisit some of the example actions and rules changes from last post: 

• Tidy up test-suite ->
  Jordan (PO) and Mel (Dev) will write a story for our next sprint
• Get input from the Ops team ->
  Kim will invite the devops team to our refinement meeting – by the end of today
• Everybody will answer these 3 questions in the daily standup ->
  Everybody will answer these 3 questions in the daily standup – Taylor will post them to the board
• We will groom upcoming stories every Wed 3pm ->
  We will groom upcoming stories every Wed 3pm – Pete will send a calendar invite tomorrow
• We will prepare the product demo the day before the review ->
  We will prepare the product demo the day before the review – Priya will set up a reminder in Slack

Do you see the difference between the before and after?

Take a minute:
Look at your recent AIs, how concrete and actionable are they?

What is the average follow-through on action items in your teams? Are you happy with that?

Full disclosure: I have no idea what the average follow-up on action items is. For my teams it’s between 60-80%. Dropped action items often “belong” to problems that sorted themselves out in other ways. So I’m not aiming for 100% follow-through. I think 80% would be cool. But even at 60-80% the teams are happy and improving. So there’s that.

Good-bye and see you soon,

Corinna

PS: If you'd rather read this Guide as an ebook, click here. Or go all in and get it as part of the Retromat eBook Bundle at a discount. A purchase also supports Retromat as a whole 🙂