[teampractices] Retrospectives: Getting deep and personal

Tue Sep 13 12:50:03 UTC 2016

These are awesome, Guillaume. Great suggestions - thank you for sharing!

On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 3:16 AM Guillaume Lederrey <glederrey at wikimedia.org>
wrote:

> A few additional thoughts (read brain dump, not much structure here):
>
> If we want to talk more about emotions, feelings and all those fuzzy
> things (which I think we should, it isn't because it is fuzzy that it
> isn't important!), we usually need to bring different kind of tools to
> the table. Language tends to steer us into analytical thinking.
> Language requires us to build structured thoughts and tend to not help
> all that much to get us started into a deeper discussion of
> interpersonal issues, or discussion about emotions. I know the "left
> brain / right brain" is a gross over simplification of how our brain
> work, but it is a useful metaphor here. Language activate our
> metaphorical analytical left brain more than our metaphorical
> emotional right brain.
>
> So we need tools to activate our right brain. I have a bunch of them,
> but none is adapted to a distributed setting. Or at least not without
> quite a bit of modification. Still a few idea, someone might know how
> to adapt them:
>
> * photolanguage [1][2]: A classic that seems to be more documented in
> French than English. By bringing pictures into the game, we activate a
> different kind of thinking. In short, the instruction could be "In all
> the pictures that are "here", find a picture that expresses something
> that your team did well this past week". Discussion starts from the
> pictures.
> * positioning games: I can't find a link for that one, but the general
> idea is: "please move along the wall here according to how you found
> the last feature development went, if you think it was really crap,
> move to the far left, if it was brilliant, move to the far right, if
> it was just ok, move in the middle...". Having people physically move
> around tend again to activate different ways of thinking. I have no
> idea how to adapt this to a distributed / online retro...
> * I have an unnamed variation of the rocket retrospective: find one
> thing that went well, one thing that went bad. Write 2 words (max) on
> 2 pieces of paper (one piece with what went well, one with what went
> wrong). Pass one piece to your left neighbour, the other to your
> right. The person receiving the piece of paper must imagine what that
> thing was based on the 2 words. While not as radical as the 2 other
> examples, this tend to stimulate imagination more. Variants can be
> that the person receiving the paper must present a solution /
> improvement to the problematic thing, or a way to generalize what went
> well. We can add constraint such as "the solution must be implemented
> by the person proposing it", ... The more constraints, the more we
> need to think outside of the box.
>
> I might add the "adjective game" in a follow up.
>
>
>
>
> [1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9thode_Photolangage
> [2] http://www.picturetelling.ch/e/method/
> [3] http://tastycupcakes.org/2014/06/the-rocket-retrospective/
>
> On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 8:44 PM, Arthur Richards <arichards at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
> > +1 to Strine's thoughts. Very similarly and in line with David said about
> > getting a team to name emotions that occurred around mechanical feedback
> > (I'm removing the 'factual' part that David originally included because
> > emotions are facts too!), I've also had success combining the "mad, sad,
> > glad" format with the "timeline" format (also in the Esther Derby book,
> > which worked really nicely for a more engineering-centric group. The
> > timeline portion helped lay everything out in a logical, event-based
> > (feeling-free) manner; but then layering the "mad, sad, glad" piece on
> top
> > of that helped reveal how folks were feeling about various events that
> > happened, which spurred deeper conversation.
> >
> > On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 10:31 AM David Strine <dstrine at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> The book "Agile Retrospectives" by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen has a
> >> section on managing group dynamics and a description of the "Mad, Sad,
> Glad"
> >> format. I also found an online example here [1].
> >>
> >> I've found that if you get a team to name emotions that occurred around
> >> the mechanical/factual feedback you can get a glimpse into the
> interpersonal
> >> issues. The emotional statements open the door for you to dig deeper ask
> >> pointed questions.
> >>
> >> [1]
> >> https://www.retrium.com/resources/techniques/mad-sad-glad
> >>
> >> On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 9:58 AM, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hi all,
> >>>
> >>> I'm looking for advice about how to structure retrospectives to
> encourage
> >>> more feedback about interpersonal issues. I believe the teams I work
> with
> >>> feel the retros are a "safe space", but the vast majority of the
> issues that
> >>> come up are mechanical, not personal.
> >>>
> >>> Of course, it's possible that there really aren't that many
> interpersonal
> >>> issues on these teams. (They do seem to be more emotionally healthy and
> >>> mature than many teams I have interacted with.) But I don't want to
> take any
> >>> chances. And I don't have a ton of experience running retros, so I'm
> hoping
> >>> those of you with more experience can provide some pointers.
> >>>
> >>> Thanks!
> >>>
> >>> Kevin Smith
> >>> Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation
> >>>
> >>>
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> >>>
> >>
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>
>
> --
> Guillaume Lederrey
> Operations Engineer, Discovery
> Wikimedia Foundation
> UTC+2 / CEST
>
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