Partnership & Possibilities

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 doing. […]

Michael Tardiff (@mjt) tweeted:
Forget pleased & surprised: I’m astonished at the energy & number of seat-switches in “Park Bench” when tackling “creating insights.” Wow.
I’ve used “Park Bench” at the end of workshops as a way of reflecting on the day or as a debriefing technique after a training exercise to uncover group discoveries. You may […]

Sometimes teams get stuck at the point of “deciding what to do” in retrospectives. Team members may begin to point fingers and describe things that the ubiquitous “they” must do before the team can move forward or make improvements,. This may lead to a team-as-victim, “poor us, we’re stuck” syndrome, or blame and finger-pointing. […]

In a comment on an article about Pixar in The Economist, Tom Agan from the Nielsen Company, writes:
“At The Nielsen Company we have just completed a study of the major consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies operating in the U.S. and those with standardized post mortems for new products, like Pixar, average almost 100% more […]

In Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great! Esther Derby and I include a collection of activities we called, “Short Subjects.” (page 122)
After Gathering Data, these useful activities provide relatively quick ways to review event, effort, and response data; reflect on the implications of the data; and Generate Insights about team experiences.

We listed these […]

Agile retrospectives aren’t just for teams or organizations. Individuals (like you and me) also use them as a way of taking stock and choosing how to move forward—reflecting, inspecting, and adapting to the changing conditions in our lives. Chronological milestones serve as a great prompts for a personal retrospective (e.g., year’s-end, birthday, anniversary, solstice, etc.). […]

Tom Cagley posted an interview with me at his Software Process and Measurement-Cast blog. Tom begins the podcast with part 7 in his series of audio essays, “Traceability, A Radical Approach Based on User Involvement.” The interview with me starts about 25% of the way in. We discuss Agile, Agile Adoptions, Retrospectives and upcoming events.

Ola Ellnestam writes about “An AI Retrospective” that ended with the group “steaming with positive energy and really going.”
Recommended reading for anyone wondering why their team retrospectives leave everyone feeling resentful or bored.