Category: Retrospectives

[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 🙂

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

Welcome back, friend!

We’re at the midpoint of the course but it was actually the very last post I wrote. In fact, I almost forgot the topic altogether. Not because it’s not important but because it’s mostly invisible to me while I do it. The other parts of facilitation – proper preparation and follow-up – I block time for but the actual facilitation is the meeting itself, no “extra” event. 

So much of what I do when I facilitate has become automatic. It is hard for me to drag it out of semi-awareness into the light to consciously inspect. There was a lot of “Okay, but how do I actually do this?”-reflection involved.

For the team, this is inverted: facilitation during the retro is the most visible part of my work with the biggest impact for the participants.

That might be, why it’s hard to learn how to facilitate a meeting from a book (or blog post for that matter). If there’s any way for you to take part in an actual in-person workshop on facilitation, do it! Additionally, take every opportunity to practice facilitating. Observing other facilitators is also a great idea, especially if you can shadow capable ones. Facilitation is a broad skill that will translate to any meeting, not just retrospectives.

So, how do I see my role during the retrospective?

I’m there to provide structure not content. For example, I set the categories in which we collect topics but not what topics get written down. As a Scrum master I may set the topic wholesale (after running it by the team: “I will bring topic X. If you see something else as more important or urgent, come talk to me”) but not what they do within the topic. I define how many votes each person can cast but not what to vote for. I allocate X minutes of discussion time but rarely influence the actual discussion.

The value I add as a facilitator:

• [Preparation]
  Covered this in previous posts
• Providing structure
  With the activities I picked – already covered
• My undivided attention and genuine interest
• Asking questions to bring out observations, clarify, and broaden what’s possible
  More on this in a later email. Impatient? Check out the Debriefing Cube and Asking for a Better Future
• Note taking during the discussion in a highly visible place
  This validates people’s input and cuts down on repetitions
• Making sure decisions happen, sometimes seemingly plucking them out of “thin air”
• Making action items more concrete
  More on this in a later post
• Intervene in the few situations I think it’s necessary
• Time-keeping
• [Follow-up]
  More on this in a later post

Arriving at Decisions

After each inner loop – discussion of a topic until thumbs down – I take time to wrap it up by asking whether the team want to follow up on this topic with an action item, a todo or a rule change. They usually do. If a new discussion erupts about what exactly to do, I’d ask for another vote on whether to spend time on this or fold without an action. 

I try to keep this “afterburn” short, like 2 to 5 minutes. This usually works, because I take notes of all the solution ideas that people suggest during the discussion. If it feels like a specific proposal had broad support I will just ask, “There seems to be broad support for suggestion X. Can I write it down as your action item?” If yes, we will then add details to make it more actionable. 

If there was no clear favorite, I will present all options and ask, “What’s something small that you can try?” There are instances in which a team doesn’t want to take any action for a specific topic and if that doesn’t happen all the time, then that’s okay. I’d rather have few action items that get implemented than too many.

If you are only starting out as a facilitator, I recommend a more structured approach to action items, because people get really angry when you mark something as “decided” when they feel like they haven’t had a say in it.

I’m Hands-off

On the “explicitly steer the discussion vs. completely hands-off”-spectrum I am quite close to the “hands off” extreme. I talk very little and interrupt the flow rarely. When I do, it’s usually with a question. Almost every facilitator I had the privilege of observing, interrupts more than I do. This is an observation, not a judgment. I’m not saying that “hands-off” is better, it’s merely my style. I shifted towards it over the years nudged by my interest in clean language and solution-focused coaching. 

Things that support my hands-off style:

• I sit to the side of the board and try to melt into the background. I want the participants to talk to each other, not to me. I’m there to provide structure and thought-provoking questions. I’m not a show master. Apart from instructions, I should not be the focus of their attention.
• For virtually every activity, I give time to think in quiet (and take notes) before participants go round robin. Not everyone is a chatterbox like me. Shy and/or introverted people have valuable perspectives to add. In order to make it more likely for them to speak up, I make everyone shut up and write first. That levels the playing field for less outspoken people and I don’t have to make sure that everyone gets a turn, because I create conditions for it to occur “naturally”.
• We all follow basic meeting etiquette and queue to speak. Teams can do a lot to co-facilitate. Chain questions are one specific example to deflect focus from you as the facilitator
• Setting a timer that’s visible to all
  Having a countdown in a visible spot means that most people are aware of time and try to stay within the limit. And when the time is up, the timer beeps and I don’t have to interrupt. I’m not the bad guy, the timer is. For real, physical meetings in meat space I highly recommend TimeTimer. 
• If I work long-term with a team I will offer my observations after the retrospective. More on this here in the paragraph “Style Critique”

Maybe I’m lucky that I work with teams that need little guidance. But I think it’s also something particular to me. My mantra is “Everybody is the expert for their own situation” from Solution-focused Coaching. 

Instead of “You are off-topic” I would say “Our topic was X. It sounds like you’re now discussing Y. Is that what you want?” Because who am I to say which of the two topics is more important to them. It’s their time, they get to decide how they use it.

Over the years I’ve often seen teams self-regulate: Approximately 10 seconds after I started wondering if now is the time to intervene and get a discussion back on track, someone from within the group will rein the them back in. I always love it when that happens, because I’d rather teach teams to do it themselves. Their discussions will be productive even when I’m not there. 

Oh! Okay, writing that out actually revealed one of my big underlying goals! I’m always trying to make teams self-sufficient, to teach them so that they can do the basics themselves.

For the record, this is just my style and goal. It’s not “the right way” to do it. I’ve seen all kinds of facilitation styles work. My real-life boards are ugly, my digital boards look nice. I never bring sweets. I do follow up on action items. I’m hands-off. It’s how I roll. You’ll figure out what works for you, too.

When will I intervene?

Obviously there are situations that will make me intervene and cut into a discussion, e. g. these:

• When the discussion seems to be going in circles
  This rarely happens if someone (usually me) takes notes on a board
• When I suspect that the team avoids something, be it a topic or taking responsibility
• Disruptive behavior, esp. when repeated
  I will neither let people talk over others, nor let one person drone on indefinitely
• When emotions are running very high
  People are getting visibly distressed, crying, personal attacks, raised voices, …

Complicating matters

There are circumstances that can render “hands-off” impossible. I can think of at least three:

1) Your job description (ie Scrum Master or Agile Coach) contains a teaching/steering component

I just said, “Everybody is the expert on their own situation” and I stand by it, but there might be situations when you have considerably more knowledge than the people you are holding space for. 

When I see a team struggling to come up with solutions and I know a ton about the subject matter, I will deliberately step out of the facilitator role: “I have seen this solved in different ways. Would you like to hear the solutions I know about?” (It is okay for the team to say no but that hasn’t happened yet) 

Another case is, when a team is honing in on a solution that violates agile principles in a company that’s striving to work more agile-y. I would let the team discuss all kinds of solutions, and hope that a team member objects to a non-agile solution. That’s more powerful than if I do it. But if they seem to settle on the non-agile solution I would point out the violation.

2) You’re part of the team you are facilitating for

This applies to me right now. I facilitate but I’m also a team member and it’s my retro, too. The lines are blurry but at least I am not in a position of authority over anyone. If there is no other order implied, I go last.

I’ve lately realized that I’m the only one who goes crazy with the reaction emojis in Google Meet. That’s just the way I am as a participant. Yet, the lines for me as facilitator are blurry and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that this is a judgment by the facilitator. Maybe that is a problem, maybe it isn’t. I don’t know yet. I’ll ask before the next retrospective. 

If you are in a bigger company, maybe you can swap with someone in another team? I worked in a place with a Philipp-swap: Each team had a Philipp that at first facilitated his own team’s retrospective. Then they agreed on swapping and facilitating for the other team so that they could take part in their own team’s retro without the double role.

If that is not an option, in co-located retrospectives you can use standing versus sitting to mark different roles. Stand when facilitating, sit down to participate in the discussion as a team member. Brian Tajuddin reports that this has worked great for him as a clear visual clue.

3) You’re in a position of authority

I’ve met quite a lot of team leads who started running retrospectives in their team. This is certainly better than not having any means for reflection and improvement but it’s not ideal. If it works in your case, congratulations on your Psychological Safety.

Be even more careful with your reactions, with showing approval and disapproval. Go last with your ideas and opinions so that the others will not prematurely conform to yours. Maybe you, too, can swap with someone else?

Wow, that was a long ass post. But you made it – Congrats and thank you for reading!

Take a minute:
What is your personal facilitation style so far? What would you like it to be? What feedback does your team give you about what works well for them?

Next week we start exploring follow-up. Wishing you a wonderful week,

Corinna

PS: Regarding the role of facilitation: I thought about what’s important to me and did not check whether it aligns with the definition of e. g. the International Association of Facilitators. So take mine with a grain of salt.

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 🙂