[teampractices] Retrospectives: Getting deep and personal

Tue Oct 4 20:54:44 UTC 2016

Thank you indeed, Guillaume. I have added my interpretations of these to
the Planning Offsites page[1]. It's great to have more tools available! I
look forward to hearing about the "adjective game".

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group/Planning_offsites

Kevin Smith
Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation

On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 12:50 PM, Arthur Richards <arichards at wikimedia.org>
wrote:

> 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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>> >>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/teampractices
>> >>>
>> >>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> Guillaume Lederrey
>> Operations Engineer, Discovery
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>> UTC+2 / CEST
>>
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