Justyna and Paul talk about Improving Agile Retrospectives by Marc Loeffler
Show Notes:
Support the Podcast
http://justbuymeacoffee.com
https://www.facebook.com/agilebookclub/
Get the Book
https://www.amazon.com/Improving-Agile-Retrospectives-Efficient-Addison-Wesley-ebook/dp/B0785W7PM6/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=retrospectives&qid=1564045464&s=gateway&sr=8-6
Show Notes
Group Model Building
https://www.amazon.com/Group-Model-Building-Facilitating-Learning/dp/0471953555/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3QO21IB6049A8&keywords=group+model+building&qid=1564047164&s=gateway&sprefix=group+model+bui%2Caps%2C231&sr=8-1
What’s Wrong with Dot Voting Exercises
https://medium.com/@stephenanderson/whats-wrong-with-dot-voting-exercises-9f121e20474a
Work Retrospective
http://www.hanoulle.be/2013/03/work-retrospective/
Tasty Cupcakes (not the site Paul was thinking of, but good stuff all the same)
https://www.tastycupcakes.org/
Calder's Mobiles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Calder
Justyna and Paul talk about Improving Agile Retrospectives by Marc Loeffler
Show Notes:
Support the Podcast
http://justbuymeacoffee.com
https://www.facebook.com/agilebookclub/
Get the Book
https://www.amazon.com/Improving-Agile-Retrospectives-Efficient-Addison-Wesley-ebook/dp/B0785W7PM6/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=retrospectives&qid=1564045464&s=gateway&sr=8-6
Show Notes
Group Model Building
https://www.amazon.com/Group-Model-Building-Facilitating-Learning/dp/0471953555/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3QO21IB6049A8&keywords=group+model+building&qid=1564047164&s=gateway&sprefix=group+model+bui%2Caps%2C231&sr=8-1
What’s Wrong with Dot Voting Exercises
https://medium.com/@stephenanderson/whats-wrong-with-dot-voting-exercises-9f121e20474a
Work Retrospective
http://www.hanoulle.be/2013/03/work-retrospective/
Tasty Cupcakes (not the site Paul was thinking of, but good stuff all the same)
https://www.tastycupcakes.org/
Calder's Mobiles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Calder
Welcome to the Agile Book Club. You're your hosts. Justina and Paul.
Paul:Yes, I can. S cool. Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Awesome. Alright. Glasses to look smart. You can see what you're looking like. Ah, okay. Glasses to look to see what they wrote down. Make you feel smart. Yes. That what listeners can actually hear. Yes. Keep the glasses on and keep smiling. Always talk about you're smiling, right? Yeah. Nah, because yeah. Nice people. You've got a mouse in your pocket. I'm a jerk. That's why you're working with me. You are the brain and I am the heart. Okay. Let's start. This is cheesy. Um, so I saw an article in the New York Times last week and I thought about us. Can I share it? Okay. The article is by Jennifer Miller and it was titled have we hit peak podcast and it opened in 2016 Morgan met Roy, ty and Lester Lee to freelance writers looking to grow their personal brands. Decided to start a podcast.
Speaker 2:They called it the advice podcast and put about as much energy into the shows production as they did the name each week. The friends, neither of whom had professional experience dispensing advice, met in a free room at the local library and recorded themselves chatting with an iPhone five we assumed it would be huge, have affiliate marketing details and advertisements[inaudible] Reuter said, but six episodes in neither Castro mattresses nor me undies had come knocking. The friends quit today. Ms[inaudible] says the same. Do it yourself spirit that made having a podcast alluring is precisely what doomed the project. You can talk about the trees outside as much as you want, but if you're going to serve listeners and do it in a way that's engaging, your chances of going viral are low. She said, calling her show the most makeshift podcast with mediocre advice. So it was your first kill my energy for today's podcast. So here's this. Look at this. This is my question. Deep are are we, are we influencers yet we are baby influences. Fabian, it's like nineties cute little baby in this in stroller that you know, that we are just waving at people and they start to see us I think, and they pay attention, but we are not so big and loud enough so they would like really pay attention and stuff. So they're not going to start throwing money at us just yet.
Speaker 3:Not yet.
:We've got five episodes done, but I bet I think like soon they will buy us lollipop or a cup of coffee. Exactly.[inaudible]
Speaker 2:coffee. In fact, let's make it easy. Hey, if you want to buy us a cup of coffee, just go to justbuymeacoffee.com and help support the podcast. How's that? Yeah, that's cool. Just buy me a coffee. Um, so, okay. So we're not thinking as influencers yet, but we will be and we're gonna be famous influencers. I actually, I don't want to be a famous[inaudible]. Um, I just want to help some folks, you know, I want to help some folks find some good books to read or says Molly and don't read some of the same money in sat time and don't read the books that they don't need to read. Um, so they can help us with that. They'll also, um, we don't have, we've got over 500 listeners, like repeat listeners. Now that's a very small number for a podcast, but 500 people. When I get on the stage at a conference, I'll talk to 200 or 300 at most. I think the biggest conference I've ever spoken at was 400 people and now I'm talking to 500. So that's a step up and I didn't even have to leave my, I didn't have to fly any place. So we've got 500 people listening to us. You know, how many of them have given us reviews on iTunes? Cool. None. None. None. Not a same on you. Yes, exactly. It. It really, if you think that what we're doing is useful, if you think that that other people should, should learn about what we're doing it as the people should hear this podcast, then please hop onto iTunes is one of the most influential platforms and give us a review. If, however you don't think people should listen to our podcast and you hate what we're doing. Well thank you for hanging in there so long. I'm pleased Janice to know. Give us some feedback. We're only five episodes into this. We're still sorting out trying to figure out the ideal production, um, set ups. We're trying to figure out the best way to do though the post-production editing. We're trying to find out the ideal format for this. I mean, I, I, I liked the book review thing and having one book that we all talk about and, and uh, having the, the takeaways and the, the favorite quotes and the, the elevator pitches and such. But if there's things we can do to make it better, then please let us know. A great way to do that is our, our Facebook group or send us an email. All the links are going to be in the show notes. So should we get right into it? Yes. What are we reading this this month?
Speaker 3:Oh, this reading w these malware rethink marks left her book, which was improving agile retrospectives. And it was kind of a checklist book for me that I would recommend for all agile newbies who, for example, never ever[inaudible] enemy thing, especially in retrospective. And they need some structure ideas, exercises and also for people who are more experienced and, and run retrospectives minimum times. And they feel like, oh, we have no idea how to improve, how to make it more interesting. We've done everything, we've tried everything. So I think like you can just look into this book to find some tools and ideas. And what do you think about the book generally speaking?
Speaker 2:Oh, I can I, I do my elevator pitch because go for it. It's so similar to yours. Maybe a little, maybe a little bit snarky or, but so similar to yours. Um, so mine was the same. I think there's two audiences for this book. Um, the first is if a person has never facilitated anything or even been to a meeting, if you've never been to a meeting or, or retrospective, they have no idea what you're doing. Maybe like, like you're an intern and under your first day of the job that somebody has said, can you facilitate tomorrow's retrospective? Then I suggest they grabbed this book on their kindle and read the third chapter. Just grab the book, read the third chapter, and you can muddle your way through your first retrospective, even if you didn't know what a retrospective was before you read it. Um, but if, and the other group of people, I wasn't thinking so much experienced practitioners, but anybody who's already read Esther Derby and diagonal, uh, Larson's book agile retrospectives and want just a few more new ideas that weren't in that book, then I recommend that they be chapter six and seven, maybe eight and nine if they're interested in distributed retrospectives and such. But, um, but anybody who's read, um, agile retrospectives can skip, I think straight to chapter six, cause that's in general. I also felt like this was kind of a, I'm not quite sure what you mean by checklist book cause I was thinking checklist book two but not doing checklist book as in a book that you can check off because because it's a book that you need to read or something else.
Speaker 3:I think something else like a guidebook with some to do list that you check if for example you are in this position right now we work with distributed teams who would go to disruptor. Then you create the strategy of things that you have to do to make it successful or if you have the team that is tired what you can do to bring more fun and then you have another lease and the new, just check if you've done this that what else you could do.
Speaker 2:Okay. I thought of it as kind of the checklist book to you, but my, my thinking of the term was a little bit different in that I think it was written to a checklist that the book is there. It doesn't have any kind of a continuous narrative or flow. Each chapter is completely separate to the extent that there are tons of repetition. There's so much repetition in this book because the same topics come up in separate chapters because every chapter reads as though it was a completely separate standalone essay or blog post. Um, and so it's almost like these are all of the things that, that a book about agile retrospectives should have. And, and the author was checking off their own list as they wrote each of the chapters, which I think, ah, how do I put it? There is some good stuff in this book and I don't think I would recommend anybody just sitting down and reading it end to end in less. They're struggling with insomnia because they're there. The, the language is so simple because, uh, this is, uh, we, we read the English language version. This book was originally written in German. Um, and I think possibly because of the translation, the language is very, very simple. The sentence structures are short and simple and it is so repetitive that it requires, I thought the rep, the repetition would be annoying. But I actually found it occasionally amusing because it was so obvious. But also reading this book required zero mental energy. If I missed any thought or any idea in the book, I didn't have to worry about it cause it would come up. Again. There's, there's nothing worth mentioning in this book that isn't mentioned at least two or three times.
Speaker 3:But I think that this also useful. I can imagine that I'm having this book on my desk in the office and I will never, I am after the retrospective and I got into some troubles on low issue, I can just open the book, go to random chapter and just get through like 20 pages to have the idea without like reading the whole book to capture the idea on how to do something because it's so repetitive, as you said, don't lose the value.
Speaker 2:So what is a good book to have on the bookshelf as a reference book or when you just flipping something open for ideas.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a reference book. That's a good, that's a good. So,
Speaker 2:okay. Um, so as a reference book, that means it's got it. It's got a spattering of good ideas in it. What were some of your takes?
Speaker 3:Hmm. Actually the first chapter was kind of amusing for me because it really pictured the idea that uh, sometimes we can be very agile at our work but we are not so agile at home and they really liked how mark described his family ritual of making new years if retrospectives with his family. I think that this was a good example of explaining what is the retrospective and to show people some structure and make sure that everyone captured the idea that it's so easy that you can do it even with children. And you remember that I've told you I think like two months ago that I also do retrospective with my boyfriend, but I call it monthly dinner, which actually proves the point. If you bring food to the retrospective, it can really help for more than a year. He didn't know that we are doing actually the retrospective focused on the food, but the outcome was amazing. So sometimes maybe two don't have this resistance from the team that is like tired of you know, all the agile meetings. And stuff. They don't have to say that it's going to be at retrospective. It's just maybe a little, some kind of a fun meeting when they can eat and talk. And during this relaxing atmosphere, share some meaningful insights.
Speaker 2:Hmm. I, I've got to say I've never had a retrospective with a team like that. When you put it that way, it sounds kind of disingenuous. Like, like it's manipulative, like tricking the team into a retrospective.
Speaker 3:Yes. It's somehow like, you know, doing the Campbell without saying that you do Camden way to throw it right back into my face. Yeah. I have a good memory.
Speaker 2:Um, I found a bunch of good ideas in here too, just just like completely unrelated things. Um, one thing that all good facilitators do when you're dealing with, with a crowd of people who all want to talk or a group of Group of people, which many people want to talk. Um, and I didn't realize it had a name until I read this book, was the stacking techniques. Do you remember that you throw out a question and then you say who say who wants to respond to this? And if there's, there's like four or five hands, um, you say, okay, first you, then you, then you, then you, and that way each person gets to talk without being interrupted. Each person knows when they're going to get their chance and that they're going to get a chance. And so they don't have to jump in and interrupt so they can actually wait and listened to what people are saying rather than waiting for their chance because they know that their next or that they're the third or the fourth. Um, and then after the people who originally raised their hands have spoken, you can ask again, which is another useful, useful tidbit, which is once you know, three or four people who've spoken on a topic, other people who didn't want to speak on an originally might've gotten some ideas in the process. So you then ask the question again. And I think putting a name to it and calling it the stacking technique makes it easier to explain that and remember. And that's, that's a really useful facilitation tip. Cause in meetings, you know, it's so often people don't actually listen to what's being said because if that's something in the mind that they want to say and they know it's going to, it takes a certain amount of mental overhead to look for your chance to, to catch the gap. And I as as a pretty introverted person and not really pushy I think. Um, not very often. I'm really bad at catching a gap. I can, I can be in a group meeting and never speak even though I have something I want to say because I just am not comfortable interrupting and I'm not comfortable jumping in and taking up space unless it's given to me. Like that's why I like being on stage, on stage. I know that I have the right to speak in room. I don't know if I can do it without stepping on people's toes. And so the stacking technique is a great way of dealing with, with that problem of people using mental energy to try to look for an opportunity, share their opinion, when they could free up that mental energy to actually use it, to think about what the other person to say.
Speaker 3:[inaudible] yeah, I think that's a powerful idea. What are you surprised when you've seen the chapter about using systems thinking approach to and reach retrospectives?
Speaker 2:I wasn't because mark gave a talk on exactly that topic at a conference in Warsaw two years ago. So I knew it was one of the things that was on his, um, on his mind. One of the things that, that he does and thinks about. Um, and so no, I wasn't terribly surprised. I thought that that was one of the best chapters in the whole book. I think, um, it's not as good an introduction to systems thinking as say, um, Donella meadows thinking in systems, but as a single standalone chapter, I think it's a, it's a lot better than a lot of the blog posts that I've seen intro introducing systems thinking. And I appreciate the fact that it's an introduction to systems thinking and building, um, causal loop diagrams, which is industry specific to our industry. And so if somebody was in software and they wanted a quick introduction to how to build a causal Du Diagram, I could direct them to that chapter of this book.
Speaker 3:[inaudible] it was also like, it was also my favorite top three and I was kind of surprised because I never taught in, it never occurred to me that you can use actually system thinking tools to improve meetings to show to the whole team the impact that they are having on the knowhow organization. Like I think like it's forever a very powerful, but I never heard anyone who spoke about it and I never met anyone who's done it. So I can't wait to talk with mark and ask him how it looks in the real life to them to retrospective what a team things, how they react.
Speaker 2:And that was one thing that I thought was missing is that yes, there are some fabulous books out there on Hussily atating the creation of causal loop diagrams because I d he says it in the book that the best thing to do is not to go up there and draw a diagram saying this is what I think is happening. The best thing to do is to have the team build the model together. Because that way everyone's invested in, everyone understands why it is the way that it is. But there was no advice on how to do that. And there is um, a large body of knowledge. In fact, there's a whole book, um, a big textbook, I forget the title of it, but we've got it in our library. I'll put it in the show notes. There's a whole book on how to facilitate these kind of Oh, of building system models. It's called, it's usually called group model building is a term that's used in the systems thinking, um, consulting community. And there's nothing about that in here. And that, that's actually another one of my just over arching criticisms about this book is it has a lot of good ideas, but none of them have enough depth. So the cynical side of me says this book will teach you how to do a whole bunch of really cool things poorly. Like for example, he talks about.voting a lot. He loves.voting and the introduction of.voting is just, if you want to prioritize things, give everyone three stickers and have them put stickers on the things that they want to prioritize. And he talks about clustering a little bit too. So cluster and count the stickers, but he doesn't address any of the challenges and problems with doc building. Um, there was a really good blog post, I forget who wrote it, but I'll put it in the show notes, um, about the, the, the hazards of dod voting. And it was like all of the things that I hate about Dodd voting all really nicely documented in one article. Like, um, one of the examples from the article was, uh, if a group of people has to choose what snacks to have at their next meeting, if the options are fruit in cookies, then you can use doc voting. And you might find that people, um, prefer fruit or prefer cookies. But if the options are fruit, oatmeal, cookies, chocolate chip cookies and peanut butter cookies, then you might find that the winning option is fruit because for people want fruit to people on chocolate chip cookies. Three people want oatmeal cookies and the two people want peanut butter cookies. Um, the other thing I hate about.voting is that the person, when, when you're dealing with a group of experts, and that's what a team, a cross functional team is the chances of one person and only one person in the room having a deep insight into an issue is very, very high. So it's entirely possible that the most important thing can get on the one vote, but they get one vote from the person who really understands why that's important and it doesn't get other boats. So it kind of in inclines and a group of people to indulge in bike shed, um, discussions. So they, they all want to talk about the things that most of them understand, not the things that are actually the most important, but there's none of that in this book. There's no discussions other, the shortcomings or weaknesses of using.voting just telling you to do it. Same with, with the causal loop diagrams and it shows you how to build one, but it doesn't tell you how to facilitate the process of doing it or what you should look out for, what you should do and shouldn't do or how to define bought boundaries of systems. Um, and that's pretty much true throughout the book. There's a lot of good ideas, but almost anything you find in here, um, if it looks interesting and you want to do it, you should definitely research deeper into the practice.
Speaker 3:Okay. Uh, I wish I will finish your talk with a quotation that I have from this book that I'll actually address what you said. It's like that, like many frameworks, it's tells you what to do but doesn't specify how your task then is to bring these phases to life. And do you do that by finding the range of activities to carry out in each of the phases?
Speaker 2:Indian, which, you know, it's, it's fine to throw it back at the reader. Yeah, I know. But, um, but it's not a matter of of practice and creativity and positive energy. It's a matter of knowledge and skill. Yes. And there's a lot of knowledge out there that's available to help you to do these things correctly. Goodwill helps a lot, but
Speaker 3:yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah, it was build on I think. Okay. So my takeaway was actually the retrospective is more than anything that is a kind of a workshop that men, uh, I think scrum musters think about it as a, just another meeting and then make a huge mistake with that because it's has like boring, repetitive structures that brings more resistance in the theme. And I think if they would be better prepared if they would really investigate into the topic, use maybe one of the checklists that a Mark's presenting the book there, we'll build more meaningful meetings and in this way they wouldn't have to fight with such a huge resistance on the team side when they weren't around another introspective. And I think like it's good just to go to the chapter meg, your own list and compare with what are you doing? Actually right now if it's more like a meeting or it's more like a workshop, everyone is engaged.
Speaker 2:I think one of the things that you said is really, really important and it resonates with me because a, there is a school of thought among people, facility retrospectives that it's, it's important to note, make the retrospective retrospectives are often boring or people don't like them. And so there are so many people who talk and write about how to make your retrospectives fun and that's, and mark is one of these people, he talks a lot about how to make led perspectives fallen by using metaphors and games and that sort of thing. And I've always been really resistant to this idea. But you didn't say that people think retrospectives are boring because in not fun, but because they're not, what was the word you used?
Speaker 3:I throw them out all was the war, but I, but, uh, I think that they just don't see the[inaudible] waste of their time exactly. Like they could do more important things that they have, like nothing will turn.
Speaker 2:And my retrospectives, I, I've done a lot of respect just myself. I, I don't do any, I think of them as goofy games. I know there's differences of opinion. Some people really love this stuff, but when I'm in a retrospective and somebody asks me what, what Beatles Song does the last iteration reminds you of, I just want to throttle them yesterday or let it be[inaudible] yeah. Or, or she loves you. Yeah. I'm sorry. Stole that joke from Lizzie Nielsen. Um, but some people love it and some people do it really well. I get that. But if you retrospectives are boring, I think the first thing you should do is try to make them engaging, meaningful, useful. If people are bored, it's because then they don't feel like they're, they're getting interesting and useful information and making impactful decisions. Yes. And no amount of fun and Games is going to change that oh by itself. So do that person make it meaningful and useful and impactful and then make it fun if you really want. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Actually I had a similar thought when I was reading the book. Like if you have a broken marriage, it won't help you. If you go to Disneyland, Bob help you really know. But okay. That's another question that I have to talk to mark, so I don't want to spoil too much. I love that. Okay. Your takeaway now?
Speaker 2:Um, oh, I actually have a bunch of takeaways because there are just so many interesting ideas spattered throughout this book. Um, I really like the idea of changing rooms often even if you're in the same building. Um, and at my last job we tend to always have our retrospectives in the same place and just because we had identified our comfy room. But, um, the idea of changing, I certainly, I like the idea of changing venues. It's, it's great to have a retrospective out of the office sometimes. But when we were in there in the office, I was in a 12 story building that had five or six conference rooms in every floor and we always went to our conference room and just changing rooms can change the atmosphere and the vibe and help separate people from work a little bit more being on somebody else's floor for example instead of on the floor at which your desk is naturally separates you from the day to day work. Okay. So I thought that was a good simple idea that anyone can execute easily.
Speaker 3:[inaudible] and then there was simple idea that I really like. And until that, it's kind of sneaky, it's to engage external facilitator that that you don't have to hire because you can dress as a scrum master from the different team. And in this way you have the objective perspective of someone who's not engaged in the life of the team that you are wanting to retrospective with and you can bring freshness, new opinions and stuff. And I thought that it's a really simple thing that you can do. But kind of powerful
Speaker 2:[inaudible] you know, I, I think, um, he made a really good case several times for using external facilitators. And the first time I, I, I read his for his arguments for using an external facilitator. I thought, well, of course he's arguing in favor of hiring an outside consultant facilitated because that's what he does for a living. But indeed, he also makes the point that if you can't, if you don't have the budget for it and you certainly can't, most companies wouldn't hire a specialist external facilitator for every single team's retrospective every two weeks. Um, those, those kinds of people that are good for when you're dealing with, with bigger issues, you can still have an external point of view from somebody with a new company. I thought that was a really, really nice point. I've seen that done before and uh, anybody who hasn't tried it highly recommended.
Speaker 3:Okay. So, so how was your experience? Because I taught about one downside. That team might feel like, oh, he knows nothing about, you know, our problems or they might feel not so comfortable with sharing. Those are the sides that I identified, but I never done it. So I have no experience and opinion. So could you share?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Um, you know what? I find the pound to be useful cause I used to, since I was, um, the lead coach, I was, I was the lead coach in, in, in my last organization. And so people often asked me to come in and either help or facilitate things that, that they were doing when they had big problems. And so I did quite a lot of this. And what one of the things that I observed is that indeed, they, they think that I have no idea what's going on, but that's really helpful because what happens is people explain the inner dynamics of their team or their project where their problem to me, like I was a child. And in the process they unpack a lot of unspoken stuff. And so it turns out that people don't, don't have a shared understanding of what they assume they have a shared understanding of until they try to explain it to, to an idiot like me.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay. That's good. I think else.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I actually have quite a few. There's, there's a lot of good ideas. Most, there's a lot of good ideas in this book that come from other sources in, in fact, it's kind of funny. I would count the number of books published about doing retrospectives on one hand and have fingers left over and I could count the number of good books on retrospectives on my thumbs. And the number of times that, that this book sites, the only other major book on retrospectives is kind of funny. It, it, it makes it clearly obvious that you should also read the other one. But he also borrowed an idea from a, Oh goodness gracious. I haven't met this man. We, we've crossed paths so many times and I've never met him in, so I'm going to mangle the name of a person who I've interacted with for a decade, but I've never spoken to face to face. And that's a Eve's hand panel.[inaudible] we, everyone knows the guy, but I don't know how to pronounce his name. But, um, I think we've all seen the situation in which people feel like they never get anything that retrospect is for waste of time and they never get anything done at them. The idea of what he calls a work retrospective just to shake things up was really, really cool. I'll work retrospective. Um, a better way to say this might be a working retrospective is rather than coming in and talking about things that you're going to do after the retrospective, bring everybody into the room, brainstorm all of the things that you could do to improve the system or the process or whatever. It could be accomplished in an hour or less. Split everybody into teams of two and then just do it. Just do the work. And the example that, uh, mark cites in this book is one of the people says, you know, it really slows down testing because the website is so slow. And so they had a team of two people who just spent their retrospective hour trying to figure out why it was so slow when they found out that they were like, um, 80 really inefficient calls to the database. And they managed to dramatically improve the response time and improve the hour, what's the word I'm looking for? They refactored 60 out of the 80 of them in one hour and dramatically improved this problem that had been annoying them for who knows how long, but it never managed to make it onto the board. Everybody always had something more important to do and so by the end of the retrospective, they actually had done the improvement rather than just talking about it. You can't do that all the time. But the idea of doing that as just a way of shaking up a team that doesn't believe that there's any value in retrospectives is really cool.[inaudible]
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah. That was powerful. Well, they really like those. One of the almost last chapter, I think it was[inaudible] talked to about distributed teams and how to run the retrospectives with them. I think that this was really needed because a lot of people right now are struggling with online, the meetings, how to make them successful, how to make them meaningful. And again, if you read this chapter, I highly recommend to just make the list of the things that you can do to, to improve it. Uh, and also to read what challenges you might come across. Because there are kind of a few and I think it's better to learn out of other people's mistakes than make your own
Speaker 2:[inaudible]. Hmm. You mentioned the distributed retrospective chapter and this is the Chapter I was reading. I wish I had a sudden burst of insight, which again, a little snarky but not so far off base and that is that there's so much repetition in this book because we've already said you could actually make this a much better, tighter book simply by deleting every second sentence. And let me, let me give you an example. It's not the craziest thing because I tried it with this chapter. The student's retrospectives, the eighth chapter opens with the advance of globalization means that fewer and fewer work together in one place and are instead spread out over many places. This naturally creates a distance between team members and the best of cases. These divided teams are all in the same time zone or in time zones with only a very small time difference, one two hours. However ever more teams are distributed over the whole Globe and who's working hours have absolutely no overlap. In addition to the time difference and physical distance between team members, there can also be distances created by culture, language, politics, or history. It goes without saying that this division has a large impact on the team and thus also I'm carrying out the retrospectives. In this chapter. I will discuss the challenges that arise from the situation in ways of dealing with them. Now you get the idea, it's there. Listen to what happens if you only read every other sentence. The advance of globalization means that fewer and fewer teams work together in one place and are instead spread out over many places. In the best of cases, these teams are all in the same time zone or in time zones with only a small time, time difference. In addition to the time difference and physical difference between team members, there can also be distances created by cultural language, politics or history. In this chapter, I discussed the challenges that arise from the situation and some ways of dealing with them. Yeah, it works. Yeah. We were with a few exceptions, you could just delete half of this book and still end up with the exact same content. Um, I know I don't blame mark for this. I blame the editor. I think that that, uh, my impression is that that mark has a lot of good ideas and he was not well served by his editor who should have worked with him to tighten this up a lot, to remove a lot of the repetition to make it flow better. That's what an editor does. That's why you work with a good editor from, from a company like Addison Westley. So what else? What else? Okay. Um, okay. Another, this is a simple thing, but my goodness, if everyone did this, it would make, it would remove an enormous, constant source of frustration from the world. This is something that I've been telling people to do whenever it comes up and I'm so glad it's, it's in print in a book. People listen to me. When you walk into a meeting room in your corporation or or in in a coworking space or wherever, you walk into a meeting room, you pick up a marker and walk up to the whiteboard. You try to write with it and it doesn't work, throw it in the trash immediately. Do not put it back down on the table or understand or if it, when the market doesn't work, throw it in the garbage. Right. Then if I'm in a room with no garbage can, I fling it across the room by the door, so I take it out of the room to the garbage can never put those damn things back. It's the same dry eye, the same dry marker. If we could do like the, the, the, then the ethnography of a meeting room, the of a dead marker and the number of humans it can frustrate would probably baffle baffled in that situation. I wouldn't be surprised if in some corporations the same dry marker had been picked up and put back down by literally thousands of people over the course of the years. Throw those things away. So yeah, I'll also, just a couple more really short ones. He references a lot of really useful external tools and sites and such. And the book is worth it just for those, one of them that if there's anyone here who doesn't know about tasty cupcakes, do you know what? Yes. Tasty cupcakes is the most amazing resource for a huge number of ideas for improving clever and creative ways to facilitate just about any sort of human activity. It's just a, an easily searchable, well written, well-structured, um, online database of facilitation games. So there was that one. And uh, oh, and the last one, uh, another idea he borrowed from somebody else, another person who, this person, I don't know them, they're all, so maybe I can be forgiven for mispronouncing the name, but I'm to, I'm gonna destroy this one too. And that was wroth drafter who uses a mobile, you know, didn't you know this, this art installation or child's toy? Most people think of it as a child's toy. I, um, think of it as an art installation because there, there was a, um, who was, it was like Calder, who is the artist who, who specialized in mobiles, who made them, okay, you can see my face, it's 20 years since I studied art history. Um, but, but there was an artist, a 20th century artists who, who created these absolutely fabulous, enormous mobiles. And for those of you who don't know what a mobile is, it's one of those contraptions in which there are several different items hanging from strings and they're all balanced on cross braces in such a way that it turns and swings if you touch it or in the wind. And he used a mobile as a metaphor for a system, for a complex system. Because when you want to change a system, if the changes and impactful enough, nothing happens and it's too impactful, you can break the whole thing. And the thing is, when you, when you blow lightly on a huge mobile, nothing happens. If you hit it with a truck, you break it. But if you push it just right, it sets the whole thing into motion. But you can't predict how it's going to move. You can't predict what's going to happen. And that's the thing that's supposed to be the beautiful. And the frustrating thing about trying to, to develop and change a complex adaptive system is that you can influence it, but only to a point and the predictability of the changes because there's so many unintended consequences. So many of the changes are unpredictable and that's the reason why, why you change gently and measure, test and adapt and, and just constantly look for the changes. You don't just do a big bang. Um, a lot of people try agile transformations or big bang changes, but you don't change a human system in, in one blow just by, by changing a bunch of rules, moving people around, and then expecting that you're going to get exactly the outcome that you predicted as a cycle mobile. You forgot about the most important part of agile transformation. It is buying a lot of sticky notes. I know transformations are great for creating jobs for independent coaches and for 3m. Okay. So did you have any favorite quotation? Yes. Yes I did. I had. Okay. All right, I'm, I'm just being some snarky here, but here, if a favorite quotation is aligned that just jumps out and hits you. How's this for one? So when he was talking about doing playful metaphor based retrospectives, one of them was the pirate retrospective where you talk about the project and you talk about the team members and you talk about what happened in pirate terms. And in that section, one of the things he said was, if you're really brave, you can get yourself a parent for your shoulder from the nearest pet shop that you don't have to be a Vegan to see that this is problematic. Parents are extremely intelligent teligent animals who live longer than humans. They're not props. You don't use an animal as a prop for a workshop. Okay. I would say that the favorite, but like of all of all the single things, like a single sentences that just jumped out and slap me in the face in an unforgettable way, buying an African gray just so you can stick it on your shoulder in a corporate meeting room to make your workshop fun. That's, that's a keeper. Right? Um, but, but in terms of useful stuff here, this is what I really liked. I had to, I didn't paraphrase but I shortened it a little bit. And that is that one of the things that frustrates teams is when decisions seem more like an alibi than a concrete measure. Remember that one? Yes. So he was talking about um, retrospectives in which people seem to make decisions that they decide that everything would be better if such and such thing were changed. But it's a thing that nobody can actually change. So, so all of our problems would go away if those idiots would do something different. Those 80 gets over whom I have no control. And that way we know the problem, we know the solution and we've proven that there's nothing we can do. But I liked the way it was put decisions that seemed more like an alibi. I also really liked that mark kind of collected a lot of Nice quotes
Speaker 3:from other people. Like one of my favorite was from George Eduardo Pellham handbooks who says all models are wrong but some are useful.
Speaker 2:It made me smile. And the map is not the territory. Yes. It's like I had one more and, and it's that, uh, I, I like to just because I think it's, it's important to remember and it comes from one of my favorite chapters, the, the, the chapter on the solution focused, the solution oriented retrospectives, which I think was a brilliant chapter and everyone should read it that it's worth buying the book for that chapter. Um, and one of the things that in that chapter was it's important that a retrospect and not focused solely on the negative. Oh yes. You know, retrospectives in which, and I think the case is made very well in that chapter. When you dwell on the negative, you change the way you think about not only the project, but the, your, your mindset, your worldview is temporarily adapted to that kind of complaining negative frame of mind. And it's not a good frame of mind in which to find solutions. And so the whole chapter is mostly about saying, where do we want to be? What is the, what is the future that we want? Talking about positive outcomes. Like, what, what do we want to have happen? What would make us happy thinking about them in terms of, of continuum. Um, so if the end goal is, is impossible or if the end goal will take a long time to achieve, what are some of the steps that will make things better and how will they feel and how will they look? And, and when you, when your people are much more, more motivated to become happy than to cease to be miserable, you know, and so that whole chapter I thought was not only really important in terms of creating retrospectives that are goal oriented and, and positive and useful, but it's also really useful in that that was one of the most, most well-structured chapters in terms of exactly what steps you should do and how you should go about doing it. And mixing both theory and practice.
Speaker 3:[inaudible] I think I commercial in this chapter, the miracle question that uh, that actually gets December isn't as, it's described that you just imagine like how your morning would look like if the miracle happened. What would you see? Will are the tanks
Speaker 2:to go? Describe the whole thing for our listeners. They didn't read this. Okay. So, so tell the whole story of the miracle question cause that's a, that's a good one. Okay. So
Speaker 3:make sure that I remember it correctly. But the thing is like a, you ask attendees of your workshop like how their life would look like if the miracle would happen over the night, what they would see in the morning when they wake up, what will be the little small changes that they can actually notice at the first class, how they would feel. And then based on that you just formulated the actions that you can take to reach the goal.
Speaker 2:[inaudible] and the miracle morning approaches is taught. Is it a way of finding the solution to a specific problem? Yes. So that seems insurmountable. Yeah. So, so a person might say, well our biggest problem is that management doesn't give us any support. Now that may or may not be true, but that's how they feel. And, and that's a blocker because a, a bunch of junior people at the team level have no influence on or feel like they have no influence over senior management. And so when they say senior management doesn't give us any support, that's the end of the conversation because they don't know what to do about it. And so the miracle question is a way of saying, now just imagine you have no idea how to, how to change this problem. But imagine that it was fixed. You don't know how it was fixed, but a miracle happened in your sleep. And when you woke up the next day, you had the full support of the management team. How would you know at what point when you showed up to work, what would be the first thing that you saw would tell you, oh my goodness, something's changed. And those little things that you can then get to that way might show a path to getting that kind of change. Well, okay, maybe we can't absolutely change the management team, but could we make that little thing happen? That's, that's what I love about the miracle morning is it's a way of, um, deconstructing impossible problems.
Speaker 3:[inaudible] and I think that it also helps people to see how they would actually feel and make them to try to reach that goal because it feels uncomfortable. The miracle happened.
Speaker 2:Okay. So what should we read for the next month? Oh, um, so let's see. We looked at our bookshelf and uh, some, some of the things that we've been talking about are, um, you've been really eager to meet the goal.[inaudible] um, again, again, I know you, but you want to discuss the goal. I'm scared about discussing the goal. I W I was talking to a mutual friend of ours, Anya, um, about this last night. And the challenge with discussing the goal is everyone know who is, it's brilliant. It's like the example I gave to her is what's the point of doing a book review of Hamlet? Just read hamlet. Of course. It's good. It's Shakespeare for goodness sake. And the goal is what? I mean, we, we, we could outline the goal. We can tell people the five focusing steps. We can tell people the story and such, but I have no criticisms of the goal. It's a fabulous book that everyone should just read. So my podcast on the goal would, would, would be like 10 seconds. Have you read the goal yet? No. Go read the goal. I'm not going to read it for you. You read it. You should. Everyone should read this. Um, so that's, um, but do you know why was tempted to
Speaker 3:read the go? Because I thought, okay, if we do review of the goal we have to do interview of the goal to interview without[inaudible] sorry, my three minutes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, that's moment of silence that um, that wasn't awkward at all. Um, yeah. Uh, that's another challenge. And um, so no, I think we could do the goal, but I would have a lot more practice doing this. We've only reviewed three books so far and before we do the goal, there's, there's two things before we do the goal. I'd like to have a lot more practice doing book reviews with you because that's going to be a challenging one to do. And also I want to get a larger, our listener base just keeps growing by, by a few hundred people every month. And so we haven't gotten a large enough base of listeners to start getting a lot of activity and feedback and such. I don't know how many listeners we need, but one of the things I've been thinking about doing is in those instances when we can't interview the author because they're too busy or too famous or, or dead, um, is we can take listener feedback, but we don't have enough listener feedback to do a listener feedback episode. So other, other options. I, there's a few books that I haven't read that I want to read and that's kind of interesting. The first two podcasts that we did were books that we read and knew that we liked. This is, this one is the first time that we have decided in advance to read a book we haven't read yet. And I think the outcome was somewhat different. This was the first book that, that we have some actual concerns and criticisms about. And the same thing could happen with any of these other three books because I haven't read them, but I want to. And they are scrum mastery by Jeff Watts. Rolling rocks downhill by Clark chain. And how long will it take by Daniel McCanty? These are all authors. I trust the books. I don't know.
Speaker 3:So I would go for Daniella Candy because, uh, I read a little about him but I never ever read and the book that he written and this kind of shame on me and I would like to change that before, uh, summaries.
Speaker 2:I would love to do that because I'm his first book. Actual Agile metrics is one of my favorite agile books ever. It's got none of the things you expect from an agile book. It doesn't have, have high level principles and it doesn't have a lot of feel good stuff and, and respect and, and um, techniques and processes and everything. It's just about the metrics. But my feeling is if you teach people how to do scrum, they could go off and never become agile. You can do all the things like, like go through the cargo called scrum and never actually achieve a, a state of continuous improvement towards corporate agility. But if you read actual agile metrics and you understand all of the math, you would have to invent your own approach. You'd have to invent a working agile environment in order to move the needle on those metrics. So, so it's kind of, it's, it's really looking at the ideal outcome and understanding the outcome of agility. And if you have a good understanding of the outcome, then you have to find a way to make it happen. So I tell people that if they don't read a single other book about agile read actual agile metrics, it's not an easy read. And the reason why I'm interested in how long will it take is I'm just from the title. I have a suspicion that Daniel Vacanti has taken to heart the advice that was given to, um, oh goodness, this is so embarrassing. I'm drawing a blank. Who was the astrophysicist who recently passed away? He would, Cambridge, Cambridge, astro astrophysicist wrote an incredibly famous book that we all read a short every history of time. Okay. So it reminds me of the advice that I'm, Stephen Hawking was given by his publisher when he was running a short history of time, which is something like you will lose half your readers for every single, um, mathematical formula you include in this book. And so the book has no math in it. And I have, I have a sneaking suspicion, I don't know, I haven't looked at this book, but I have a sick sneaking suspicion that how long will it take? Is Daniel the canteen's attempt to rewrite actual agile metrics without all the math? And I'm curious how he goes. Yes, yes. I'm curious. Okay. So for next month, our next podcast of course, is going to be an interview with the author of improving agile retrospectives, mark lesser. But our next book review a month from now is going to be how long will it take by Daniel Vacanti and hopefully we'll be able to get him to do an interview with us as well. I think he will. Yes. I hope so. So thank you so much for listening. It's always great to have you tell your friends, tell your family like us on whatever service you can like us on iTunes is a great one. But, but whatever service you're using, please comment and give us feedback. Rate us if you like us, write to us. If you don't, we'll listen. Really honestly. Um, we're all about feedback and we're really eager to make this a really useful podcast. We want to be really useful engines. We're doing this for fun. We're doing this because I'm what you seen and I work together all the time, but so much of our work takes us apart. So she has her heart of the business that she works on. I have my part of the business that I work on. So this podcast is a chance for us to come together and do something fun together, but we also want it to be useful. And so your feedback can help us to make all future episodes that are for everyone. So rate us, give us feedback, and thank you so much for listening. We love you. Thank you. Going right.