by Janus Boye
Aino on stage at the Boye 19 Aarhus conference
Using a wonderful example of the fictitious software firm Titanic Corp, experienced facilitator and agile coach Aino Corry made it clear, that the point of a retrospective is not to blame Peter, but rather to understand the circumstances that led to striking an iceberg and ultimately sinking.
Aino recently hosted a member conference call on the topic, as she has just written a book about antipatterns for retrospectives. Her prime motivation was that she seemed to be making the same mistakes over and over.
In her own words:
Antipatterns are like patterns, only more informative. With antipatterns you will first see what patterns occur in "bad" retrospectives and then you will see how to avoid, or remedy, the situation.
What’s the right mindset?
To avoid team meetings that suck, Aino reminded us of the definition of a retrospective. It’s is a specific meeting, session or call it a ceremony if you like, where you share what has happened. The goal is threefold:
To understand
To appreciate
To learn
In her book, she shares 24 antipatterns and leads with what she calls the ‘Prime Directive Ignorance’ antipattern.
This is what happens when you enter the team meeting and have forgotten the goals as mentioned above. Have you ever had this happen? That’s rarely a fun meeting to be a part of.
Norm Kerth famously put it like this in his book Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review:
"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."
Disregarding preparation, being trapped in a time loop and more
The list of anti patterns are both fun, yet also a painful reminder for many. In the call, Aino also dived into what happens when you disregard preparation and how this impacts the meeting.
She covered the importance of body language and reminded us of how non-verbal communication matters. If you are doing it in a remote or distributed setup, it’s key to have video turned on, so that you at least get a chance to also interpret the facial impressions through the screen. Aino’s advice is to not let participants hide from their home offices with the camera turned off. She also stressed the important of not recording the retrospectives. You want openness and trust. That’s harder for many when they are being recorded.
A reference to the famous fantasy comedy Groundhog Day was also mentioned by Aino. Some retrospectives can feel like being trapped in time. Specifically, she focused on when team members try to lift weights, that they need help lifting. Or in other words, as a facilitator, you should try to focus the conversation on what you can actually do something about.
Advice for the facilitator
On a personal note, and based on her now 10+ years experience with facilitating retrospectives, Aino stressed not to worry about as much as she initially had about not knowing all the facilitation tricks, exercises and icebreakers. Her recommendation was instead to focus on setting the stage, considering your body language and handling the room.
In the Q&A part of the call, we talked about how the patterns work cross culture. Might there be reluctance in cultures with a shorter power distance? One trick Aino has deployed, is to prepare a Google Doc and open it for anonymous access, so that team members can enter their input without filter and fear of retribution.
Learn more about Retrospectives Antipatterns
You can browse the slides from the call and naturally also order the book.
Finally, you can enjoy the entire 28-minute recording below