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Organization-wide retrospectives? Open Space!

For the longest time, I thought “company-wide retrospectives = “normal retros, but scaled up with activities that work for big groups and lots of breakout sessions”. If you had asked me if it’s a good idea to do company-wide retros every once in a while I would have said yes. Retros are always a good idea in my book – as long as they enable change.

Did sipgate (my place of work for more than a decade) do company-wide retrospectives? No, only on the team level. Was it a problem? Also no – except for a few exceptions. It took me an embarassingly long time to realize that the reason there were relatively few unaddressed problems was that THERE WERE COMPANY-WIDE RETROSPECTIVES. But I didn’t see that because it was a completely different mechanism. It served many of the same purposes, though: The Open Friday.

Open Friday / Open Space in a Nutshell

“Every other Friday, everyone at sipgate is free to do what they think is most valuable for the company. Additionally we hold an Open Space – a spontaneously organized conference. Everybody who wants to take part gathers for the opening ceremony at 10am and participants announce their sessions, bit by bit creating a schedule for several rooms and timeslots. Attendance is 100% voluntary. Participants visit the sessions they are interested in.” – Paraphrased from OpenFriday.org

How is an Open Space similar to a retrospective?

Actually, it’s not that similar: the Open Friday (OF) fulfills A TON of different purposes. I think that’s why it took me so long to see that it ALSO serves as company-wide retrospectives, because it so much more than that. But hosting company-wide retrospectives is probably the biggest chunk of value the OF adds:

Headline: A circle headlined Open Friday. With in the circle are smaller circles called Research; Show&Tell; Training; Collect ideas/experiences; Special retros ie post mortems, after an event (these are obviously retros); and the biggest circle is Address problems - Compare observations and ideas - Come up with a plan of action (suspiciously retro-shaped)

That big dark green circle are sessions along the lines of “I’ve noticed that X. I think this is a problem because Y. I’d like to talk about whether it is a problem and if so, what we can do.” These are the sessions that fulfill many of the same purposes that retrospectives fulfill in a team. The topic is set beforehand and everybody interested in it will self-select to attend. With the people there you build a shared understanding with many different views of the topic and explore different solutions.

Where are these sessions different from retrospectives?

  • In a team retrospective it’s clear who is going to attend. In an Open Space this is completely undefined. The upside: Everybody who is there wants to be there. The downside: No control over who is there.
    In some unfortunate sessions all the people, that are aware of a problem, take part but none of the people in positions to fix it, attend. (You can still act! But it will be along the lines of “What evidence do we need to show to whom to affect change?”)
  • You need someone to address a problem before you can work on it. For many people it will be more difficult to speak up in a company-wide event than in a team-sized event
  • Accountability for implementing actions is typically lower in large groups than in small ones
  • The session is facilitated by whoever suggests it whereas retrospectives often have a dedicated (and trained) facilitator. (Rarely a problem at sipgate because the level of hive-mind facilitation skills is really high.

Conclusion

The best way to hold a company-wide retrospective might look different from what you think. It certainly looks different from what I used to imagine.

In hindsight it’s quite ironic: “Open Friday” is easily the “hack” in my / the sipgate book “24 Work Hacks” that people get most excited about. That’s the one they want to copy. I was always a bit sad on behalf of retrospectives, because that would have been my pick. And it wasn’t until years later that I finally realized that people DO pick retrospectives, it’s just that they need something to address company-wide issues a lot more than something usually used at the team level. It makes total sense to me now. Most hard problems are bigger than a single team.

Since it took me so long to get to this major light bulb moment, I thought I’d share with you.

PS: You don’t need start holding an Open Space every 2 weeks to get the benefits. You can start a lot smaller. Find tips on Open Friday.org (which was also written by me, back in the day).

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Facilitation is a Team Sport – New Book

What if you could have better discussions as a team – shorter and with more shared information? With or without a facilitatior. And if you yourself are the facilitator: What if your life could be easier?

Please welcome my FREE new mini book 🙂

It introduces techniques to improve your co-located discussions. We’ll look at 

  • Finger Queue to improve turn taking and flow
  • Hand Signals to visually add information and cut down on repetitions and 
  • Lean Coffee to prioritise topics

Check out “Facilitation is a Team Sport”

PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books

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Sneak Preview: Miro Templates

[Update: It’s done! Check out the Retromat Miroboard Mega Template!]

Ever since Covid hit, we use Miro at my work. A lot. For all our remote and hybrid retrospectives. To make preparing easier we’ve got a board with templates for about 30ish activities. It’s helpful but the collection is haphazard and they have very different looks to them.

So I got thinking… What if I made a template for each and every activity in Retromat, all 144 of them. Because I use Retromat to prep 99% of my retros. And it would fit my workflow beautifully: Pick activities that I like, find the template by its ID, copy it into a new board for the individual retro, maybe finishing touches like entering names, boom, done!

Behold the budding Retromat Mega-Template:

I’m 50 activities in and have already started using it. As I think it might be useful for other too, I’ll turn this into a product, when I’m done. (Paid Miro plans can export and import boards.)

The nice side effect of designing these as a product is that I build them a lot prettier than I would build a set for just myself. I’m known for my knowledge of methods, I’m not known for pretty boards … Well, until now!

Via the newsletter I found beta testers and have already improved based on their feedback. I think it’s gonna be great \o/

Are you using a digital whiteboard? Which tool? And do you also have a template board for quick preparation by copy-pasting?

Update: It’s done! Check out the Retromat Miroboard Mega Template!

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Free new mini book: Asking for a Better Future

For years and years I’ve been meaning to get a proper coaching education. Last year I finally took the plunge and this year I finished the year-long programme “Lösungsfokussiertes Coachen und Beraten“. It’s been amazing and I’m so glad I picked it! Solution-focus is definitely my jam 🙂

It’s helpful as a mindset in just about any situation and retrospectives are no exception. If you’re looking for something that will help make your retrospectives more energising and achieve better results, say no more, that’s what I wrote my final thesis on:

Cover “Asking for a Better Future”

PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books

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The Retromat Forum is live – Join :)

tl;dr The Retromat Forum is live – Connect with fellow facilitators

It’s high time to support a community around Retromat that is independent of me!

For example, because there are a lot of cool activities that never make it into Retromat – for various reasons (such as being tied to a specific time of year). But these activities would still be valuable to a lot of fellow facilitators. And in the Retromat Forum these can still be widely shared!

Another reason is that y’all are amazing people! The overwhelming majority of Retromat users I talk to are lovely and insightful and more of you should get to meet each other! (Only if you want to, of course!)

When I thought about which platform to build, I landed on forums. I’m probably showing my age here… It’s just that as far as asynchronous exchanges go, forums have always worked for me. The old phpbb forums, Reddit (arguably a kind of forum). My hope is that I’m not alone with that and forums work for you, too!

Screenshot of the Retromat Forum

You surely know why communities hum or fall silent: They rise and fall with the people and discussions in them. I’ve met enough of you to know that you are interesting people with all sorts of tricks up your sleeves so I’d love for you to join! Get an account and share that activity! Or ask that question 🙂

Check out the Forum!
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Responsive Retromat

Big news: As of March 2021, Retromat.org is responsive and adapts to all screen sizes. We’re a teeny tiny little bit late to the party, but better than never 🥳 🥳 🥳

This is the biggest change since Timon Fiddike rewrote the backend in 2016. It’s been on my ToDo-list for forever. At least 5 years. I mean, mobile devices are not exactly new 😉

Now, I finally, finally get to close this tab in my head and Retromat is much more accessible! In the end, the rewrite was both easier and harder than expected: It was easier because Past-Corinna was pretty smart about decoupling the Java Script logic from the layout. Plus, Flexbox is cool and my SO helped me with grid (CSS). It was also harder because there were many small things I hadn’t thought of. And one big one: Thank you Timon, for setting up a test server!

The Retro Mates’ support gave me the energy to finally tackle this. Shout out to them! And may we all bask in the glorious feeling of finishing something big-ish 🙂

PS: If you want to help make Retromat more awesome, why not become a Retro Mate?

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Improve your retrospectives with this 1 weird trick: Liftoffs

When health is concerned, preventing issues altogether is often easier than treating them once they manifest. The same can be said for retrospectives:

“In retrospectives we often make up for the fact that we didn’t have a liftoff”

Either Deborah Hartmann Preuss or Steve Holyer said that in a conversation and it rings true. Very few teams get a proper liftoff and they lose weeks and months of productivity to initial friction. In contrast, a proper liftoff sets up a team for success by laying a solid foundation of agreements and shared understandings. Then the team doesn’t have to spend their retrospectives patching up problems that could have been avoided.

What are liftoffs exactly?

You might know them as kickoffs, jump starts, launches or project starts – a meeting at the beginning of a team coming together and / or starting to work on something. I’m going with the name “liftoff” because of the book by the same name written by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies.

A huge chunk of “Liftoff” describes Agile Chartering as a way to clarify purpose, alignment and context of the team and work. Srinath Ramakrishnan summarises it like this:

“Agile chartering is a lightweight minimum documentation approach to creating initial understandings, agreements and alignment about the work and how it will be accomplished.”

A liftoff is a longer event, lasting from a day up to a week. All the necessary people take part, i.e. the team, the project sponsor and whoever else is needed to provide context and insights. Many liftoffs are also off-site which improves focus.

If you forgo a liftoff you often spend a lot of retrospectives on clarifying things that should have been clear from the get go. Of course, there are retro activities that can help, such as:

But you try to compensate for a lack of alignment in short stretches of time and typically with crucial people & their knowledge missing. You really wanna do liftoffs, trust me. Your retros will go a lot smoother.

So, what if you missed the start? The project is already underway and you find yourself with a team patching up cracks in the foundation instead of “clicking”? Well, it’s never too late to reboot with a mid-project liftoff to (re)gain footing.

Check out “Liftoff” for details on how to run one 🙂

PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books