Are your inspection spaces failing? This might be the reason why
Here is an invitation to travel with me a few years back in time: it was another retrospective day. I meet with my team, facilitation plan in hand: I had put intention and time to designing the space, I had thought of entertaining activities to keep everyone engaged and I had even put (a lot of) attention to the visuals to make it appealing. I go in the room and, an hour later, I go out puzzled: the retrospective hadn’t been successful. I knew it. But what had gone wrong?
As Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, encouraging inspection and adaption is a fundamental cornerstone of the work we do everyday. But what happens when we see no traction to look for that continuous improvement? What do we do when our teams don’t want to inspect and adapt?
This is what I learned: always look for the root cause. What’s behind that push back?
1- Teams see themselves as power-less
When a team is not empowered, they can’t see possibilities. They believe “it is what it is”, there’s nothing they can do to change the situation they are in and nothing is ever going to change. Let’s imagine for a moment that was the case: why would we want to inspect if we believed that we can’t actually change anything? It looks like a waste of time, doesn’t it?
I often find teams that reject retrospectives (and other inspection spaces in general) because they are in this stage. I find apathy, demotivation, frustration and even sometimes anger.
Antidote: Experiment and look for “quick wins”
Help your team recover (or gain) trust in themselves. A low-risk way to bring this to live is through “experiments”. How do you put this into practice? Approach your teams and share with them your observations, show them what you see. Offer to work with them in a little experiment: something that can help them create a small change and can turn into a confidence booster.
Here’s what I like about the idea of “experimenting”: to start with, experiments can work, or not. When a team is lacking trust and doesn’t believe in real change, it doesn’t matter how many times we say something works, they need to see it by themselves. On the other hand, it helps us create a context where what we are doing is not definitive, it’s volatile enough that we can roll it back if we don’t feel comfortable. When executing an experiment, it only has to be “good enough for now” or “safe enough to try”. Then, we’ll reflect on how we did and how we want to continue.
It is important that you can iterate with your team so this is not just a little accomplishment that gets lost, but something that repeats showing the possibility of sustaining the behaviour in time. Bring your team to reflect looking back at all those small accomplishments and encourage them to celebrate them as part as their evolution journey. Don’t hesitate to share with your team how proud you feel of them and the progress they have made (small or big, sometimes a little step forward represents a lot!).
2- Teams believe there’s nothing to improve
On the other side of the spectrum, we could say, we find teams that are ok. They are not facing major challenges, they produce some results. So, why improving?
Improving does not mean to fix something that is not working or is catching fire. And this is part of what teams need to see, experiment and adopt in their evolution journey to becoming high performance.
Antidote: Show them what they don’t know that they don’t know
When we don’t know that we don’t know, we can’t do anything about it. Help your team expand the knowledge of those things they don’t know. Find ways to make visible where they are and everything that is still possible for them to explore. Support them with training and coaching. If you have the chance to get your team to interact with high-performing teams, go for it! Seeing live action continuous improvement can help you create impact. You can also support your observations with concrete data to start theconversation: How is our code quality evolving? What technical practices have we incorporated in the last little while? How is the value that we are delivering improving? You can take advantage of both quantitative an qualitative data. Keep an integral approach when doing so, you don’t want to leave any important aspect out when sparking that reflection.
3- Teams don’t open up
A retro where nobody speaks up or we have extremely superficial conversations… Raise your hand if you’ve been there!
Any inspection space needs to be a safe space where teams can feel free to speak up and put everything they have on the table. A big combo of respect, openness and courage is needed to work on finding ways to continuously improve. Unfortunately, these spaces are sometimes not as safe as they should be.
Antidote: enable the necessary context for trust to live
Make sure to get to an inspection space with a team agreement in place. Work with the team to create it in advance: what’s the culture we want to create? What behaviours do we want to promote and which ones do we want to avoid and won’t tolerate in the team?
Normalize conflict: conflict is healthy, as long as there’s respect and a common objective to glue us all back together in the end. Avoiding the conflict is denying the storm, but living in continuous conflict wears us down. If the team hasn’t yet defined a common goal, help them find it. If they have it, make sure to reinforce it every time you feel that the parts are bigger than the whole.
Don’t forget to keep a systemic view: what is preventing the team to opening up? Who are part of the inspection spaces? How are the things brought up in that space used by the people involved. Sometimes, there’s more than what we see at first sight. Stay curious.
4- The system is bigger than the sum of its parts
Each team is a system immerse in a bigger system. What is the vision of continuous improvement in that area, department or organization? What are the organization’s values and how is the culture supporting and encouraging the inspection and adaption? What behaviours are being promoted and how does that help (or not) teams to be excited to improve.
Antidote: mindset, practices and behaviours, structure, culture.
An integral approach to change can help us bare in mind every aspect we need to take care of to be able to create real sustainable change. What is the mindset that we need and what is the intention that will be driving our every action? What behaviours, practices and tools do we need to bring it to life, what structures are going to support that and what’s ultimately the culture we want to create as a whole?
5- My expectations as a facilitator are bigger than the why behind the space
Let’s be honest, who doesn’t want as a facilitator to walk out of a space feeling that they have contributed to creating a before and after for a team? Now, what happens when that desire (and even that expectation put on ourselves) is bigger than our ability to be present in the space?
Antidote: here and now, what do I think my team needs?
Many times, I think I have lost count of how many, I’ve walked out of retrospective spaces with no actions. Many times, I’ve cancelled inspection spaces that I felt wouldn’t be fruitful.
Look to understand where is the team today: how is the team understanding their ability to improve, what is their disposition. If the conditions are not given yet, it is very likely that you will create more impact by working on enabling them first (even though it my represent a “delay” today). Then, you can focus on finding actions that can represent valuable experiments. Venture with your team in that journey.
Looking at the OSAR model created by Rafael Echeverria, sometimes you need more than a first degree learning. If as a facilitator you believe that is valuable, and even necessary, to through your facilitation plan out of the window to allow for that second degree learning to happen, don’t hesitate for a second to go for it. Trust in the why behind that action and the possibilities that will open up for the team as a result, and make it all transparent to them.
—
In your journey working with teams and organizations to continuously improve you might find some of these impediments. You might find a combination of them, or you might find other ones that I haven’t talked about in this article. Let me leave you an invitation to embark in that journey open to possibilities, challenging the status quo, with an experimental approach and an always-learning mindset. Happy journey!
