A Solution Focused Retrospective
Reflecting on the way you work
One of the most powerful practices you can apply to your work is to take time to reflect on how you do the work. This is different to the content of the work. It’s how you do the work. This is important at all levels of business from the Board and C-Suite all the way through the organisation.
I’m always surprised when I asked senior leaders, “When was the last time you reflected on how your team gets stuff done?” and the answer is “We don’t have time for that!” We might all chuckle at this but how often do we do it with our own team?
Reflecting regularly will not only improve how the team works, it will also improve psychological safety, motivation and morale. That’s a good return on investment for a small amount of time.
There are hundreds of formats for running Retrospectives. I first wrote about this one back in 2015 on another site1 which has now lost some of the content so it’s time to give it some love and bring it back to light.
Team dynamics are different to debugging tech
Most retrospectives are about how the team is feeling e.g. happy, sad, confused etc. We then try and understand the cause of the problem so that we can fix it, in the same way that we try to debug an issue with a software program. This approach makes sense when dealing with complicated problems, such as software, and hardware, which have direct cause-and-effect relationships. However, when working with team dynamics, we are working with, and within, a complex system that doesn’t have a direct cause-and-effect relationship.
Trying to understand the root cause of something in a complex system can take a lot of time and isn’t necessarily helpful in finding the desired solution. In complex systems, there is no direct relationship between a problem and the desired solution – this is one of the things that define a complex system.
Solutions-focused approaches to change have shown that a more direct approach for complex systems is to investigate for clues of where evidence of the solution you want is happening already and do more of it. In addition, you can also identify small actions to take, like mini experiments, to see if these actions nudge the complex system toward the desired solution. The following retro format uses one of the tools from a solutions-focused approach called Scaling.
SF Retro Summary
Usage: Good to help a team understand what they are doing right, should do more of, and feel optimistic about continuous improvement.
Description: Use a scale to determine how well the team is doing, what is working even a little bit, what incremental improvements would look like, and what small actions would improve things. This is not a problem-solving exercise but a solutions-finding exercise.
Duration: 60 minutes for small teams (8-12 people). Longer for larger teams.
Materials:
In-person: White-board large enough to draw a long horizontal scale or long table or even the floor, post-it notes, markers/pens
Virtual: Online white-board tool that allows the drawing of shapes, lines and adding sticky-notes
Preparation: Write the questions from step 5 on one piece of flip-chart paper, and the questions from step 8 on another page and leave them covered until they are needed. If working online, keep the text of these questions off-screen until you get to the steps in the process.
Retrospective Process
- Draw a large horizontal line on the white board and mark it up as a scale from 0-10. The more people, the larger the scale should be.
- Hand out post-it notes and pens to all team members. Make sure they have plenty of post-it notes each. If working online, demonstrate to attendees how to add sticky notes to the diagram.
- Explain to the attendees that 10 on the scale is the most ideal period of work that you could have had (since the last retro) and 0 is the opposite. Leave the details of what 10 and 0 are as relatively blurry since they will mean something different to each person – and that’s OK.
- Ask the participants to think about where they would rate things over the time period being reviewed on the scale. Pick a number. This number is subjective to each person, and I prefer that participants keep it to themselves. The number itself is not important. It’s the questions we ask about that number in the next steps that are important. Have people make a note of their number.
Note: If you use the retro format for a number of sessions, don’t insist that the number that participants come up with each time is higher than in the previous retro. The rating is a subjective number and depends on what has happened in the period of time to which the retro applies.
- It is important that you ask the following questions exactly as phrased to get the most out of this exercise. Have participants write each answer that they come up with on a separate post-it note. Ask each participant to come up with at least 8-12 ideas from across all the questions. Give the participants 10-15 minutes to do this. If you have previously written these questions on flip-chart paper, you can show them now.
Q1. “Write down as many things that you can think of that made your number that HIGH as opposed to zero.”
This is a deliberately different question to “Why is the score not 10?” We specifically want to know what is happening that makes the score as high as it is.
- After a few minutes, continue on to asking these questions:
Q2. “Are there any times since the last retro when the number was higher than now? What was happening at those times that made the number higher than the one you chose today?”
Q3. “Who or what helped you in giving a number that high?”
Q4. “What else made your number that high? What else? What else?”
- Have the participants come up to the white-board and stick their post-it notes below the scale line, anywhere along the scale, while leaving some space towards the higher end of the scale for notes that will be added later.
- Spend 15-20 minutes going through the notes and expanding out what each note meant and understanding what was happening and HOW we made it happen. We want to know what’s working, and how to do more of it, and what resources we used to make it happen.
Resources may include qualities, skills, co-operation, friends, others, opportunities, money, time, attitudes – absolutely anything that helped.
- When you have explored much of why the rating was already that high. We can explore how to improve from here.
It is important to ask the next question as written to get the most out of this exercise. Have participants write each answer that they come up with on a separate post-it note. Participants can probably come up with 3-5 options each. If you have previously written these questions on flip-chart paper, you can show them now.
Q5. “What might you notice was different for you to give a number one step higher on this scale e.g. if you’re now at a 6, what might you notice was different for you to give a 7?
Q6. “What might others notice if you were at +1 on your scale?”
This is not about what action you would need to take but just what might you notice was different. It is also deliberately not asking, “What do we need to be at a 10?” Sometimes the gap from where we are to 10 is too large and trying to bridge the gap creates resistance and stress. Focus on small steps makes this much more achievable. Also, what is 10 today maybe be different tomorrow.
- Have the participants stick their post-it notes above the scale line and towards the 10 end of the scale.
- Spend time going through the +1 ideas to understand what they are and to check if they are actually a small step up the scale rather than trying to go from say a 6 to a 9. If they are a larger step, ask “What would be the first small sign that this was happening?”
- Sometimes, the above is enough, and, if you have time, ask the question
Q7. What small, unremarkable action could you take in the next day or so that would help make progress on these ideas?
The answers to this question may or may not get you to +1 but they will help you make progress.
Have participants note down their actions. As the next few days unfold, there may be other tiny steps that participants come up with that will move them up on the scale and it’s OK if they take those actions instead.
- End the session by thanking everyone for participating. Capture the output of the session in whatever way is convenient.