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How to bring about change with retrospective

Retrospective - a complex format of teamwork, containing elements of brainstorm (board), coaching and feedback.


Regular retrospectives that bring about changes from below are the most important feature of an organized live team.


Unfortunately, quite often retrospectives become a boring formal ritual that does not lead to changes, or they completely disappear. Perhaps this is due to the loss of retro essence, like meetings to work with emotions.


An experienced facilitator is required for a retrospective. This is especially important in starting teams.


If you are such a person and want to deepen retro, in the article you will find tips and original look at this meeting with t.ch. brain work and the purpose of stimulating the personal growth of participants.


purpose


It is widely believed that the purpose of the retrospective is to improve the work. This misses a key detail - autonomy. I think the purpose of the retrospective is that the team itself improves its work.


So the goal is to change people. Those. retrospective, this is a bit of psychotherapy. We need to create new habits, change our view on something, sell changes to everyone, and not just come up with new instructions.


To control the instructions need a manager. And an autonomous team must control them themselves, which requires decision-making by team members on a personal level.


Thus, a retrospective is, in fact, a team coaching. Based on this, it is possible to shift the standard coaching approach to the group and look at the structure of the meeting through this prism.


For the desired effect, it is critically important that people are motivated to change in general. Understand why they should make efforts to change themselves, understand where they go with the company. This is broader than the context of this article, further implies the existence of such a motivation.


How do people change


Two general principles of coaching based on which to choose retro activities and evaluate their success.


1. Come to your senses


Changes are new connections in the brain, i.e. they need a window of neuroplasticity. For this, the first part of the meeting should be structured so that people talk about their emotions: ideally, even bodily sensations, in relation to the issues under discussion.


It is also important from the point of view of forming the basis for insight. Formulating emotions, we are aware of our problems and desires and subconsciously begin to solve them. This is a reflection.
In retrospect, this is the task of the first part of the meeting - the generation of topics.


2. Use the mind


After realizing the emotions, it is necessary to classify them, evaluate and decide whether we want to do something with them or not. Apply rational.


This is the second part - discussion and completion. Here you need to determine the specific steps, goals, choose a responsible. Ideally, those responsible should call themselves, but if the team is new, tired, or inexperienced, a reasonable push is acceptable to get the first positive results.


Even if, at a retrospective, it is not possible to formulate good steps with those responsible, if it is possible to speak frankly about emotions, it is already good. Many changes occur gradually and unconsciously. Simple attentiveness to your feelings - improves well-being. Additionally, insights themselves arise after.


Therefore, it is important not to overload the team and not to form too many expectations. Otherwise, the retrospective can be perceived as pressure and instead of an open discussion of emotions, there will be closeness and protection.


Meeting structure


Like all meetings, a retrospective can be divided into three main parts: expansion, discussion, narrowing. Plus an introduction and summary.


I will not dwell in detail on specific activities, there are numerous clues about this, special retrospective maps, books and Google. We also wrote a little about it a year ago.


It’s about what we want to achieve at every stage and why.


1. Introduction


Start well with the authorization of past results and goal setting.


Retrospective is a regular activity. In order for the team to penetrate, work and eventually began to lead retro itself, you need to show a positive result. To do this, at the beginning it helps to review the results of past retro and focus on what has been improved. What did not succeed - you can also speak, but without demotivation and defamation. That is why at the first retro it is permissible to push the team to concrete steps and responsible ones, and then to control their execution. If there are no positive results for all - it is difficult to expect the purchase process and independence further.


The goal is important to pronounce for new and inexperienced, but even experienced can forget or misunderstand. This is an open discussion, reflection and independent improvement of work processes. It is also great to link changes to current big goals: fulfilling a large team task, increasing the salary, reducing the risks of dismissal and so on.


2. Collection of topics


It is important that people talk about real emotions, and not give out their rationalization and stereotypes. For example, the popular activity of the brainstorm “Glad, Sad, Mad” activity often leads to this.


Good practice is to choose an activity that asks people to remember specific work histories or tasks and to remember their feelings from them. Remembering, harder to avoid colliding with your emotions. For example, you can take tasks from the last sprint and offer to generate for each what was cool and what can be improved.


Good practice is to change the activity, because they become boring, and people, instead of diving into reflection, begin to act stereotypically.


At the end of the activity, you need to cluster (pain, emotions, growth points) and vote (for example, points ) to select topics for discussion.


3. Discussion


Next, you need to discuss selected topics, go deep and generate ideas for improvement. Regular facilitation, depending on the number of topics and participants, you can use different methods. In series or parallel in groups.


Following the results, similarly, we cluster and vote ideas.


4. Completion


And the development of specific steps. It is important to focus on a small amount of improvements to be made. Perhaps more importantly, focus on the fact that there are overt supporters and willing to take responsibility. Since Our goal is self-improvement by the team and, in the bright future, self-organization.


Sometimes it is better to try to implement not the most effective step, but the team or a specific person will get the experience of independence. Compromises and coordination can kill the initiative, this should be avoided.


If the team has little experience, convince that the selected improvements will have the time and other resources necessary for execution. For the same reasons, the importance of authorization of the first results.


Note the specificity of the goals and proposed improvements. See best practices below.


5. Retro on retro


If you have time and effort, spend 3-5 minutes collecting feedback, which was good, what can be improved. It is possible in the form of voting by building to the line, it is possible in the form of stickers. This allows not only to improve, but also to better consolidate the results of the meeting with the participants.


Best practics


Just a few basic ones, which are especially important not to forget.



Summary and what to read


Conducting such meetings regularly, with the traditional frequency of once every 2-4 weeks, after a while you should see a positive change and greater involvement of the team. The best sign is more smiles on their faces and a more relaxed atmosphere.


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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/442318/

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