Three Things to Change Exercise: A Different Kind of Retrospective
Ask Your Team: What are Three Things We Should Change?
Fostering open and ongoing communication within your team is a critical component of successful leadership, and sets the stage for a culture of growth and continuous improvement.
A healthy, improvement oriented team regularly reflects and iterates. One particularly effective approach is the use of retrospectives, a practice that has become increasingly popular within agile and scrum methodologies. Retrospectives offer a structured yet flexible way to address and implement improvements continuously.
If your organization is already conducting retrospectives, that's excellent! If not, this exercise can be a great starting point. It's also useful in matrixed organizations. While cross-functional agile/scrum teams may conduct retrospectives for each product iteration (or sprint), the quality engineering team (or other function-specific teams) might not have their own. This presents an opportunity to focus specifically on your team.
Overview of the Three Things to Change Exercise
Ask Your Team: What are Three Things We Should Change?
Start with your immediate team. Ask everyone to set aside some time to think of three things they feel the team should change. These can be significant changes or minor tweaks; the level of change suggested is up to each individual. Suggestions for change should reflect on processes, collaboration, or any other areas where the team sees an opportunity for improvement.
I ask my team members to send these to me privately, letting them know that I'll be anonymizing and aggregating them before sharing the results with the team.
Every time I have done this exercise, I have been amazed at the insightful and creative responses from my team members. Even though everyone knows they can always make suggestions, giving them a dedicated channel and a direct question always yields meaningful results.
Analyze the Responses
Once you have responses from everyone, it's time to look for commonalities or trends. ChatGPT can assist with this, especially if you have numerous responses. Specifically, I asked ChatGPT to "Summarize and note any common themes or trends in the answers."
Share the Results and Determine Action Items
Now it’s time to share!
Share the anonymized results with your team and ask them to vote for the top three. Then as a team, brainstorm ways to implement these changes effectively.
Example
When I last ran this with my team, two of the top themes that came up were Collaboration & Visibility and Work in Progress (WIP) & Context Switching.
My team felt that we weren’t collaborating as well as we could, and that there wasn’t sufficient visibility across the team. Additionally, they felt there was too much WIP and context switching within the team.
To address these, we came up with the following changes:
We decided to limit our team’s Work in Progress (WIP) & Context Switching by:
limiting ourselves to one big tech project at a time, with one additional smaller project.
moving interrupt-driven, non-project work to a two-week rotation.
We decided to increase Collaboration & Visibility by:
ensuring each project has a dedicated project lead, who is exempt from the rotation for the length of the project.
ensuring at least two people participate in each project.
restructuring our team meeting and planning meeting, dedicating a few minutes to updates on each project.
collaborating on and publishing a quarterly project roadmap.
After implementing these changes, team members reported a significant increase in collaboration and visibility into the team's overall activities. We also observed a noticeable reduction in WIP and context-switching, leading to more focused and efficient work.
Taking it Further
You can expand this beyond your immediate team, and ask your boss to run this for everyone reporting to them. Or, if your team frequently interacts with other teams or is a service team, you might ask the teams you serve if they have three things they’d like to see your team change. Tread lightly in the latter scenario, as you may not be able to change all (or any) of the things suggested by people outside the team.
Conversation Starters:
How do you cultivate an environment of growth and continuous improvement within your team?
How do you encourage open and ongoing communication within your team and your organization?
What types of retrospectives or other feedback-driven processes do you find useful?
Until next time,
Brie