Partnership & Possibilities

Steve Berczuk writes a short and succinct article on TechWell describing, “Why Agile Retrospectives are Important in Software Development.”  I’m looking forward to reading the comments and responses he gets. More and more I think of Agile Retrospectives as an opportunity for the kind of learning that leads to real adaptive action in complex situations. [...]

Partnership & Possibilities: A Podcast on Leadership in Organizations EPISODE 4: MISSING THE MARK “If we admit that we can continually improve, we somehow think we’re admitting we’re not enough right now. And I don’t think of it that way, I think we are doing the best we can right now, and we can identify [...]

Partnership & Possibilities: A Podcast on Leadership in Organizations SEASON 2 EPISODE 1: STORIES WE TELL ABOUT OURSELVES “Stories can be very powerful, [but] it’s not enough to just have a story to tell, it has to have relevance, it has to have meaning, to you personally, you have to tell the story sincerely, [and] [...]

Coincidence is a funny thing. Have you noticed that some topic/issue/concept/activity will come up in your life, then for a while you bump into it everywhere? Happens to me all the time. Lately, I’ve been bumping into new ideas for check-in activities, and reminders about familiar ones. Pete Roessler posted on his blog about an [...]

By Diana Larsen Every time I ask about team’s challenges with retrospectives, a recurring theme comes up: Acting on Actions. I hear, “Our team doesn’t follow through on our plans for action.” Or I hear, “Our team never identifies improvement actions.” Both are retrospective “smells.” Smell: No Action Identified When there are no improvement actions, [...]

Diana has written previously about the Human Systems Dynamics Institute and their excellent program that provides models and methods for dealing with our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world of complex adaptive human systems. In this post she focuses on the HSD Adaptive Action model and its unexpected connection to retrospectives: In 2006 Esther and [...]

by Diana Larsen Add “Project Weather” to your retrospective design to both “Set the Stage” and “Close the Retrospective”.  As an opening, it provides a useful segue into creating a shared story and begins the process of gathering data. As a closing, it illustrates any shifts in team members’ perspectives that have occurred as a [...]

Over at her “Insights You Can Use” blog Esther Derby has posted two pieces on how teams can benefit from the lens of Double Loop Learning in their retrospectives. Chris Argyris first wrote about the concept of single and double loop learning in the 1970′s. Esther offers a specific application for Agile teams with: A [...]

In a article at the Six Sigma IQPC site, Christian Loyer offers a new twist on the old fishbone diagram root cause analysis approach. He describes the usual application of a fishbone diagram for digging in to solve a problem. In addition to Ishikawa’s Ms for manufacturing fishbones that Christian mentions, I’ve also used Ps [...]

Martin Jul writes about a retrospective activity in the post “Retrospectives – Adapting to Reality.” He describes an interesting process for highlighting issues in the Generating Insights part of a retrospective session. In this activity we mark out three sections on a whiteboard: “DO” is where we put the things we should do or keep [...]