[teampractices] Retrospectives: Getting deep and personal

Tue Sep 13 10:15:43 UTC 2016

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