Take Time to Retro
The team I manage works in Sprints. This means that at the start of a two week period, we have a meeting to plan out everything that we hope to get done in the next two weeks. We look to our backlog, a list of small projects that help us reach our larger goals, and assign out items to each person. We size them, estimating how long they might take, and divvy up the work according to available capacity and interest. For someone who is organized like me, you would love this system. It allows each person to have ownership over different things that need to get done, with enough guidance so they know what success looks like, but enough freedom from the system to make their own decisions. My favorite part of this process though, is not how organized it is or how much we accomplish in a short period of time, but it’s what comes at the end of the two weeks. We get together and have a Review & Retrospective Meeting.
During the Review portion, we focus specifically on what we accomplished. Each person gets to present what they did, and as the Product Owner I make sure they met the acceptance criteria. More importantly though, we take time to celebrate what we accomplished and show what we’re proud of. I love watching each member of my team talk about what they did with pride, sharing the challenges they overcame and the parts of their accomplishments that they are most excited about. Once the Review is finished, we then carve out at least 30 minutes for a Retrospective. This is where we don’t talk about what we accomplished, but how we accomplished it. We discuss our process and collaboration, sharing what went well, what didn’t do well, what surprised us, and what action we'll take to improve the way we work. This part of the meeting is very easy to skip, but I could argue that it is the most important.
In work and in life it’s very easy to just focus on outcomes. What did we accomplish? It is easy to take out the red pen and point out the parts of our work that fell short, or things we wish we did better. The red pen problem exists in everything we do. What we really need to do, when we see a lot of red, is ask why. Why did this go the way it did? Is there something we could do to make less red next time? The Retro allows us to take a minute to pause and think about what we could have done differently.
The next time you look back on something you did and start to take out the red pen, instead take a step back and dig a little deeper. Think about not just what went wrong, but why it went wrong. It's easy to look back at your week and be mad at yourself for skipping the workout, sleeping in, eating the ice cream, or doing any other bad habit you've been trying to quit. It's good to see where we fell short, but understanding why we fell short is the key. Sometimes, it's completely out of our control and that's okay. When that happens on our team we talk about it, we share how it felt, and then we move on knowing that it will never be perfect and that's alright. Sometimes, though, it is in our control. We realize that the reason we didn't meet the deadline is because we should have done something differently. By taking the time to look beyond what we do and take apart the way we do it, we open ourselves up to growth.
