Using Retrospectives for Smoother Team Collaboration

oh Ben hi hey Crystal [Music] they are Magdalena hey everyone uh welcome and kind reminder that you control the volume of the sound the music that you're hearing in the background at the bottom of the of the screen hi there hey Paul and do let us know what's your experience hosting retrospective so far where do you place yourself on the on the screen yeah it's a room full of experts man you excited yeah definitely yeah Crystal we sit next to each other at the media office last week right oh nice yeah I I was I was a level lower yeah it's still weird right that was that was really good yeah [Music] it wasn't that bad I think I was so immersed that it was kind of like I haven't felt no hunger no sweats No Lack of air but yeah I spent there four hours you get it through your legs yeah and all right thank you so much so we we're like towards the experts kind of the situation which is awesome Arthur because then we can like explore ideas and my next invitation to y'all is to head over to the chat and find the gift that represents your team during Retros what's the vibe and share the gifts [Music] wow that's the intense [Music] foreign [Music] can't decide in between uh silent fighting Diamond fighting all right let me kill the music thank you so much keep them coming please they they are a um a feast to the eyes welcome everyone uh my name is Anna Maria if we haven't met before and I am very very excited to have Arthur with us today uh but before we welcome him and passing the Talking Stick I am doing a quick check in the room and see if we have anyone here that is finding themselves in butter for the very first time now go to the react there we go glic hand up welcome to butter uh you can also use these react buttons to the left side of your screen to just you know give us a virtual hug or like celebrate your party with us so that's that anyone else besides Jill that's here for the first time Magdalena also okay everyone else I know they're kind of like well well versed in hello hi and I cannot see where I can switch on camera sorry you should be able to do that everything happens to the left side of your screen and there you have a mic and a video icon so that video should be green let us know you can also press the letter V on your keyboard here we go or the letter with the art points for you my friends point for you all right so uh we are recording this session as we do with all of our communities uh workshops for sharing them on YouTube and with donated for anyone who cannot make it live so I just want to mention that uh if you're more comfortable keeping your cameras off that's also perfectly fine and I am stoked to have Arthur with us today Arthur thank you so much for accepting my invite to host us and to talk about retrospectives it's the end of the year and it's usually a great time to enter that reflective mode and uh what better way to do that than with the retrospective and Arthur if you don't know him yet he's the founder of Workshop Wednesday where he is teaching teams to work better together and with each other and also together with their customers and since 2010 what is that 12 years Arthur has helped over has helped teach over 200 people and teams to create healthy team habits so they can build digital products that their customers love did I do a good job at introducing the Arthur feel free to stay away yeah thank you for that it's quite an introduction so super super excited to be here um first time I was thinking about a mixer which is cool I really love butter I tried to squeeze it into my client work more often as well so uh yeah it's uh it's been a well received ah yeah on the link inside there I'll get back to that because I have a new challenge for myself this week um so the idea of today is to focus on retrospectives of course as you've seen in the um invite and as you meant the most of you are like um like medium to more advanced already at facilitating retrospectives um I think today is going to be interesting to maybe learn a different spin a different take on retrospectives uh how to facilitate them I kind of got like a structure that maybe you can copy for your own perspectives to make your lives easier and um yeah maybe you learned some some facilitation approaches from my side that uh you didn't see before because every time I see another facilitator do something I learn something new that's that's so much fun in these uh these kind of sessions um so to um finish up the intro I want to ask one more question before we jump to a mirror board so in the mirror board we're gonna do some exercises but um and I'm here maybe you can pop up the last questions for the intro and that's uh what do you hope to learn in this bottom mixer event um so we already know kind of like your your level of retrospective facilitation but is there any specific that you saw in the invite of the event or anything that's just popping up to mind right now that you would like to learn in this event um like I said I got a mirror board with a couple of exercises in it that we will go through um but maybe I can spend some a little bit more time on specific parts or um even maybe we can add a thing or two if the time allows for it so uh do we still got music on because I don't hear it uh let's give a minute and then let's go through the answers thanks [Music] Christmas special I don't have it but there are some good good people on LinkedIn the virtual agile coach probably has one or maybe Dave westgard um so they are really good with uh themed retrospectives uh like TV shows and series my retrospectives are more like um yeah I would say like action effect which there's our ours now mine are more like um around topics like Atomic habits or like popular Concepts Are Made Simple I would say uh that that's that's a better way to phrase it so let's run through it so to run retrospective with confidence I see a lot of votes for that um so I remember the first time I facilitated my retrospective that was in 2010 as Anna Maria said and I was really nervous and shaky and sweaty and sometimes I still have it actually that I'm kind of like um before a retrospective or works of the chicken like the the goods nerves so I've learned to use those like this dopamine hits or how do you call it the the those adrenaline rushes in a positive sense and that's because I use a lot of structure to make my life easier so I'm gonna help you with that in a sense um and learn further techniques and ideas to add into your retro toolbox aligns with that um I like to have like I like to be over prepared and unstructured so I've like a fully worked out mirror board but if I see that it makes sense to go in a different direction then we go in a different direction and because everything is there I'm happy to do so because I know that it's easy to to adjust and work with the work with the with the participants of the Retro uh how to make a retrospective exciting for people yeah that's uh I think uh something we will cover as well as today uh and that's um mainly in the um sense that we're gonna work with the paints and the ideas of um the people participating in retrospective so before um I used to come up with a topic that I thought was fun to do but now I include the participants of the Retro perspectives way more in coming up with topics because then there are already more committed before you even start your retro so I got some guidance around that as well uh yeah it's going to be your brain extension um so Christmas special I'm sorry I can't I can't do that right now but it's a good idea I see a couple of Christmas backgrounds already some new ideas and practices definitely uh how can I develop my creativity to create a retro got some guidance on that as well uh with some with a framework actually that that helps you to develop retro Fox stop faster I just want to be and I want to know the community because I discovered this today so that's uh thank you for joining that's a great reason to be here I'm not sure how to face it but how to focus it more on the process that's also something that we will be covering so that's uh that's quite a lot of topics that we got um ahead of us so maybe you can jump to the next um step Anna Maria and that's uh um jumping to the mirror board um so I think I can start it as well yeah um recording yeah so I will be um guiding you to the mirror board um let's take a couple of seconds to make it load for everyone um and then in the mirror board we've got this great feature bring everyone to me which is uh I can't uh mention enough how much I love this feature um so what you see over here this is like the the workshop that we're going to do today uh so if I zoom out all the way then you see a lot of exercises um and that's what I meant with being over prepared some exercises we're gonna maybe even skip over or have a quick look at and some uh we're gonna spend way more time with um the basic idea or the basic promise for today is how can we use server perspectives or a smaller team collaboration in 2023 um retrospectives are a great way to help our teams get one percent better every day but how can we do that and how can we keep retrospectus excited exciting even after you've run them multiple times how can you keep them fresh how can you keep improving and yeah um prevent that it's something that you maybe might stop doing uh the what what topics are we going to cover today to do to achieve that goal uh so first we're gonna have a look at how to choose the right topic for an extra Pro and then we're gonna have a look at how to uh phrase that topic as a question or as a challenge because everyone likes a challenge and then if they start with that for your retrospective then everything else becomes easier it's actually 50 of the the hard work in designing retrospectives and then we're gonna have a look at my seven step record framework which is um like an extension of an already popular framework uh it's something that I built in middle I will show you how you can use it to design retrospectives quickly and effectively so why retrospectives I love this idea from Atomic habits it's a book by James Clear I saw some uh positive responses when I mentioned it earlier so the idea here is that if you improve one percent every day for one year then at the end of the year you will become 37 times more productive or better when you're done so these small habits they they stack up over time and because of that you will get compound interest and yeah we've um this is really difficult concept to grasp but this is uh something uh maybe uh covet helped us understand better what exponential growth is this is what the startups are are trying to achieve but then um yeah it's it's still really a difficult concept to to understand um because if you only do like a small thing at every day how can it end up in such a big result but it's true it's actually um yeah worth the effort so who do you retrospect this with well your team you need a facilitator that's probably you if you're joining this session when they do it um I just want to say that I have bigger problem to find this one person every day like what I can do every day I don't have problem to accept that it will be better after a year but because I know this book also I I have read in this book also so okay I have a mirror template that you can copy specifically for Atomic habits I will link it later in the in a session as well uh and there I've broken down the steps on how you can do it so it's something you can do for yourself it's something you can do together with your team um I think you will uh yeah you'll find it helpful um so we already had the introduction um yeah it is maybe um something I didn't share this before yet but I started posting regularly on LinkedIn I tried to do it daily since this week so if you can show a little Support over there that would be already amazing for me uh you can have a look at this later after the session as well uh so let's let's get to it let's get to it uh first topic how to choose the right topic for your next retro so if we go over here then this is an uh um a graph which represents the stages a team can be in and the productivity that the team has in that stage everyone's still following me yeah here we are so uh this is called tuckman's team stages uh maybe you're familiar with it maybe not um actually this is a concept that I use a lot for my uh for preparing my retrospectives it's something that helps me identify um get an understanding of where a team is in I usually don't get to work that long with teams so like a couple weeks and I want to quickly have an idea of where they are in and what might be [Music] most beneficial for them to focus on uh in the weeks that I work with them so um the idea here is that this graph it's not like rigid it's something that should help you identify and spot opportunities um and how you can do that is actually with this uh this exercise over here this is an exercise where the different stages are described so you have forming which is the like the first stage it's uh getting to know each other it's uh where you are polite uh you might be avoid controversy yet um and you attempt to attempt to Define your task and processes that you yeah that you need to do in order to to be successful um and typically in this stage teams need to create team agreements establish like a bigger Mission while we're doing what we're doing I set some uh some goals and ground rules then the second one storming um this is actually where a lot of teams get stuck in even even after working with each other for months or some some painful examples of teams being stuck in here for for years um and this is where teams are figuring out how to complement each other with skills and and their ideas and behaviors that you might see is like arguing uh they're looking for vocalarity or competing for leadership um and the faster you can get out of this stage the better you are at guiding this process um the more effective your team will be and then the easier your life will be as a as a facilitator so what do they need over here improve relationships better understand each other Define roles and purposes um because once you got through that stage then you get into the norming stage this is where productivity starts to increase and this is where people are moving from trying to prove themselves and then testing each other out to a more problem-solving mentality so they're actively listening to each other they have agreed on processes and are comfortable with being with each other even if they have their teammates maybe have some quirks that uh that they yeah didn't um fully understand at the beginning of meeting each other to help teams from from that stage to grow even farther further you can help them with decision making processes problem solving as a team and taking a responsibility of things that are happening inside and also outside our team then the next stage this is performing which is a great stage to be in productivity SS at its highest you're highly productive about personally professionally you're self-organizing around problems and and opportunities that you support you know each other's strengths and weaknesses and how to play with that and the difficulty here is to maintain the flexibility that you have and to keep moving in the same direction and the same goals um and then adjourning that's actually the the last stage uh journey is when you know someone is going to leave the team so they have not left the team yet but they're about to uh maybe a week from now maybe a couple months from now but you know it's gonna be a different um pretty soon so that's why you see people maybe grieving or the momentum slows down people get Restless at what you can help teams here with is to evaluate their their efforts they made together to celebrate their successes to tie up loose ends and also to capture best practices uh you don't want to lose the knowledge of that person as much much as possible so for every stage you can use retrospectives regarding the needs to help the team get better or get through that stage and then to grow in a sense retrospectives are great um for every of these stages for every of these needs and if you use this model you actually are using retrospectives more on kind of like the relationship building maybe some some mindset Concepts that you're using uh and and sometimes a little bit about practices and tools that the team are using but mainly it's around how can we work better together which is a great way to to grow as a team so that's uh that's his model and I would like to ask you to brainstorm for yourself with the postage the sticky notes at the top uh what opportunities you see for your team so grab a sticky note uh we will set a timer for two minutes uh write down some ideas um and so if you grab the like the pink sticky note then you might be thinking that your team is in a storming phase um what what can you help your team with uh why are they in this stage and and what the AP do you see and what might your team be needing to to grow to the next stage so grab sticky notes um do we set a timer in butter music let's do Miro and I will just use the music and for uh Jill and Magdalena joining us from for the first time you can interact with mirror directly in butter so if you hover over and move around that's Nero just like you usually know it so I just wanted to get that out of the way okay and then timer is rolling or you can just grab a sticky note and then you double click it then you start typing and just put it anywhere on the The Columns where it makes sense for you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] yeah perfect time flies so I see a lot of great input over here doing this this brainstorming for yourself it's actually a really powerful skill to develop because the next time you spot something in your own team or a new team that you're joining you're able to act on it more quickly uh to come up with suggestions and to help the team yeah move forward to the next stage so um I'm going to put the names on the sticky notes which is also a great feature in Milo so for the most of them we should be able to see who wrote the sticky note so keep this ideas that you put over here in mind I'm going to explain the next concept and then we're going to turn this this ideas or these opportunities these problems that you spot over here into topics that you can Define for your next retro so gonna basically build kind of like a um how do you say it like a like a calendar of topics that you can do for your retrospective uh in the comment periods um so that means that we're jumping to the the next topic Anna Maria which is uh why should you start your retro with a question so um we just covered how to choose the right topic for your retro so this this helps you to identify okay where can we focus on um now the next step is um learning that that topic into a challenge that you can solve together with your team and I'll explain here uh why we will do that so the thing is um if you sorry about it if you start a retrospective with a problem then it's easy for people to get defensive uh to feel maybe judged or not good enough or yeah get it get into a more closed mindset so if you start a retrospective with the ever making this mistake every time it's really horrible that we're doing that um yeah you can imagine what that brings up in Emotion wise and it's really difficult to get people along uh on the journey to try to solve the problem so a better way to do that is to make use of the how might we statement questions uh how my Greece are really a powerful way to phrase challenges um and in that sense make everyone part of the the problem solving in this case uh I might really prevent from making a mistake X that that's more uh it could be a little bit more positive even if I read it like that but the basic idea here is that um our might whis they help you reframe uh the biggest challenge without prescribing a solution yet so how I'll suggest that we do not have the answer yet and it helps us to explore instead of just executing I would think the solution might be because if we just execute Without Really exploring and thinking it might be that we run in the wrong direction wrong direction might suggest that we can put out ideas as a group and that they might work or might not either way is okay um and then we that's the element of collaboration uh because the most optimal solution will most likely come from teamwork so there's this simple way of phrasing your challenge and then um phrasing how you want to start a retrospective this is already a super um powerful way to make it more easy uh um and to loosen up the the group together more involved um so as a next step I want to ask you to write down a couple of how my tweets for your next team retro um so um you just just phrased a couple of um opportunities or challenges in in the previous exercise um so you can either copy that or um yeah just just brainstorm out of what you've got at your head and then write down a couple of how my trees which you think might be useful for your team so you start with hmw or how might we and then you fill in the blanks um I'm gonna set a timer for three minutes um take your time to write a couple of ideas and then after the three minutes we're gonna review a couple of them if you have any questions we can take some time for that to do so so yeah DJ you're really good at this okay three minutes um if you find this difficult uh that's that's okay it's uh it's a skill to build so like kind of like a muscle that you exercise um so this is something you want to keep on practicing um if you find it challenging we can talk about it after the two and a half minutes so [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] here we go [Music] so I'm going to filter on sticky notes and then I can show the name okay um so I'll bring everyone to me again so uh great input um so I just uh copy and pasted this extra slide because I remember that I got it so if you stuck with with writing a micros then there are a couple of ways to improve them you can boost the positive or you can expect the opposite you can slice down a bigger problem into smaller problems question assumptions break the status quo create an analogy and identify unexpected help so when looking at these sticky notes I'm a preview stock then we can jump to this and maybe um we get there unstuck also it includes a YouTube video where I go more in depth about um how my two questions uh there's actually a workshop about that as well um so for now I would like to choose a couple of um how might we notes and then um maybe you can spend some time to to um yeah describe your the thinking process and maybe any questions that you have so let's start with Marcos um which one stands out for you from the things that you wrote down for yourself that you want to talk about right now Marcos hi everyone I would like to discuss uh this one how might we say the achievable goal why this one yeah okay um sorry for my English I will tell you no it's perfect go ahead okay the team that I'm working on the customer has uh um so big expectation and the team always say yes yes yes I want this yes uh the the client say I want that other yes how can can we set achievable a goal that satisfied the customer expectation but the the team can be comfortable to go through that that uh got it also yeah definitely uh that's that's uh really uh a difficult skill to to develop um to be able to say no more often um saying no it's really powerful because you can achieve more if you don't do everything at the same time uh but yeah with with clients with stakeholders uh sometimes you feel that if you say no that you're that you're root um so while we're talking I um was typing along um So based of your original question um you could slice it up into like smaller um challenges as you might say for your retrospective um because then um it feels less uh daunting less big and then you can solve one problem first before moving into uh bigger areas um so I would try to make this even more specific so um if you would focus on managing expectations um you could phrase it on something specific so this is uh like slicing the problems so the the third one if you slice it more then it becomes easier to to solve that so um instead of managing expectations for the full project maybe there are some specific parts that you can can start with um so hopefully that helps you a little bit in your in your journey uh um Marcos before we move to the next um that's awesome I have not think about it you just resolved some big travels I just have thanks that's that's amazing to hear uh happy to hear that so slice it up into smaller chunks and then you will make your own life easier as well um okay how might we promote accountability I got some uh some photos here um Andrea why did you write this one down issue with the new team um that we are in the process of creating a team agreement and you know and to have like um a way to discuss like how we're gonna walk it also makes sense to me that we discuss like how we gonna make ourselves accountable for the work that you know we said that we're gonna do so that's kind of like the I why I put that down yeah it's really a strong question um yeah because if you because this is not something you can solve on your own right um You can say we we have to hold each other accountable with if it's not being done in the in the daily work then yeah you can say whatever you want um so by phrasing it in in this way um this is a great um like invitation for the team uh to talk about this and to to see how you can can handle that um so what I like to do with more sensitive topics which this might be or might might not be it could also be just um like um the team members are more Junior uh but regarding accountability um this could be something that I um brainstorm for myself and then think okay before introducing this to the whole team maybe it makes sense to talk about this with one or two persons if we if this would be something worth exploring in the retrospective uh because if I can get them excited they I can involve them in the preparation of threat perspective and also maybe even a little bit a little bit in the facilitation um and then I'm not the only one running the the uh initiative um so that's that's what I would try to do here uh find some uh kind of like uh allies to to work on that um before starting retrospective because then in retro itself you're already uh broken the eyes and then it becomes easier yeah due to uh um yeah come up with ideas that makes sort of sense to me yeah that's that's I'm happy to hear that uh that being said uh I have two templates as well that you can use which I'm going to paste here um so hybrid team agreements um where are we oh sorry yeah here we are IP team agreements um this is a mirror template that you can use um not only for hybrid teams but just to create any team agreements so you can take inspiration from that when creating team agreements um I find that asking interesting questions helps a team to come up with better team agreements so if you just say hey what what do you want to agree with then yeah you might get some answers but maybe not the most valuable ones but if you prepare some some specific questions then everything will become easier so that's something you can find in that template and then another template which I mentioned before is the atomic habits retrospective and this is about following up and an accountability so one part of this is about the the four laws of behavior change which you've read in the book probably as well um I I made it kind of like a workshop that you can do for yourself or your team um and also to talk about okay what do we do if we fail to be accountable um if that's the right phrasing but if you if you're not um holding up to what you agreed on uh so what do we do uh do we sing a song do we buy lunch do we do do we get fired what else uh can we come up with because if someone comes up comes up with them with that themselves and it's something you agree on us as a team then everything else after that will become so much easier uh okay I'm gonna pick one more example and then we're gonna move to the the last part of this uh Workshop um is there anything that's standing out for you Anna Maria that you saw that you think would be fun to to talk about uh to ask you before I'm putting you on this part now you mean you mean from mine uh it could be your own it could be someone else is there anything that you saw on the Post-its so for me for example if if I look at the storming part where everything's kind of scrambling I added how might we stick with the uncomfortable situations longer to truly understand them yeah I find that we avoid conflicts by Nature as humans especially in workplace scenarios and so how do we talk about those topics and sit in that uncomfortableness longer and not avoid that yeah so I'm thinking things like stinky fish and all those uh bubbling of the yeah yeah so we usually don't talk about yeah um so it depends right this is the the standard uh answer of uh of a coach uh depends on the situation um I've been I've been I've worked with teams where it was really um like um so you have five levels of of conflicts maybe you know that model as well um I'm gonna find try to find the quick image um that represents it um but you cut like level five which is World War and and like level one is a prompt to solve and then anything in between so so based on those those levels um I would go for different uh approaches uh but if it's uh like uncomfortable because there is a yeah maybe uh like a high level of disagreement so it's it's a nearing uh World War um but yeah sometimes um yeah sometimes also uh maybe uh not you who can solve it because that's something I learned myself in the past I tried to solve it every time and then sometimes it's it's not something you you can solve even with the best retrospective prepared even with the best facilitation uh so as I've learned to accept that um as a starter uh but then you want um you want to create that opportunity and having uh like um a rhythm of retrospectives so um I prefer to do them weekly and then short like 30 minutes because then you have quick feedback loops and then you can see if the the the things you want to do are actually being follow up on um so weekly retrospectives and then maybe make parts of them async so you don't need to do it everything in real time and then in the Real Time moments that you have with each other you can go really in depth quickly that can help and then [Music] visualizing the problem can help a lot so um for example there's one team that I've worked with that used to be honest like 20 times in one sentence and and that's usually a sign that everything else that that they are saying might not be so honest so one thing that I did was during conversations I I took a score of how many times that was being said uh no judgment just to um make an observation hey this is happening a lot uh in our conversations um what's what's the reasoning behind it is there something maybe that we can um do with it or don't you feel safe maybe in in the conversation so and and actually that led to um lots of um variable conversations and actions that we could take after doing that simple task of taking score um so visualizing that's that's a really powerful tool so if you ask people how happy they are with their workday at the end of every day and you do that for two weeks and then there's a lot of low scores then you can bring it to the team and then say is this something that we're okay with or do we want to do something about it um yeah awareness definitely a visualizing that's a really powerful tool to make people more aware um so um yeah maybe um conflicts that happen is that something you can maybe visualize or like passive aggressive messages that get get being sent create kind of like a timeline or from it um as I said in the beginning it depends uh but yeah if you can can find it in that area that will make um your step to success uh a little bit easier uh so um there's anything regarding um your um I might wish that you want to burn some ideas off just send me a message on LinkedIn and then I'm happy to um to brainstorm with you um so what I did for my own retrospectives I built kind of like a library this is a notion page that you see um and I built a library of questions um this is how might we build a deeper understanding of our customers and users how might we work together more in a sense of Genius um and this Library helps me to quickly speed up a retrospective it could be something that if I worked with a new team tomorrow um I tried to figure out okay which stage are they in okay storming might make sense to um focus on giving and receiving feedback um and having this Library makes my life so much easier uh and if you work with a group of facilitators in a company or as a kind of like Consultants having a shared Library that's that's even uh better because then you can learn from each other's expertise so I would highly recommend to create a library like this um and the example that you see here then if you collapse it or expand it and then every mythical question links to a me report that I can duplicate for that session um this is actually also something that I've included in my retrospective course um so if you want to get a copy of that then that's part of the course uh just so you know let's move to the third topic uh which is uh over here and that's the seven step retro framework uh and this is a framework that helps me to spin up new retrospectives quickly because once I've defined a question um like how might we a challenge for the retrospective then the framework guides me to make sure that the the workshop itself is structured in the right way and that always helps me to set myself up for Success so the seven step retro framework it's something that five steps are from the book at your retrospectives by Esther Derby and Deanna Larson and I've added a couple of steps to make it more like a cohesive um approach for myself so go off today breaking the eyes follow up on previous action items get a data generate insights decide what to do and check out um I have a template for myself um emiro which is just the blank um agenda items that you see over here so the things that I just mentioned of the framework if I spin up a new mirror board then I have one template with just like the yellow timeline and the topics next to it and then also this part to go off today is a template that I've included in that as well and then I have the I might be blank here but because I already thought about it I can build it in and then I know okay this is the challenge that we want to solve and then for these specific steps uh what do what what exercises make sense to work towards success regarding this challenge um so breaking the ice that's something that we did in butter today uh which is a super fun way to do it um so that's um something I always do I take a couple minutes two to five minutes to break the ice I want to let the group every participant of the group say something even it's if it's only one word because the earlier they speak in a workshop or in any meeting uh the faster or the better their contribution will be during the rest of the workshop so um I tried to connect Icebreaker with the topic um sometimes it's something completely random like take a picture of the most fun place that you like to launch or it could be completely random but usually it's kind of like a soft Bridge from the topic to getting into the actual uh meat of the retrospective uh and then this is a step that I added compared to the original framework uh follow up on previous actions because if you come up with lots of actions in your retrospective and then the next time you sit together and there was no progress made then basically the the time that you spent together was a waste of time because yeah if you don't have any follow-up on your on your actions then there's no progress and then there's no improvement um so if you don't follow up on previous action items and then retrospectives will become boring super super fast um so that's something regarding accountability something really to focus on and then we get to the uh like the the meat of the workshop uh which is to to get a data um this is uh one approach to do that um I've uh like um a retrospective design system built for myself and then for every stage I have like five to ten exercises that I can pick uh which I think makes sense to include so in this case it's a learning metrics it's a it's a common uh facilitation tool where you brainstorm ideas on what you want to continue doing change and new ideas and then show some show some appreciation to your team members um and then I try to include always the instructions next to it uh for myself uh because the next time I facilitate it then I don't have to reinvent the wheel and also if other people want to make use of my templates then then it's easier uh so get a data here's where a lot of the uh generating ideas happens and then once we have a number of ideas then we could do a floating session so with the dot voting we see that there are a lot of votes in this case for making uh daily stand-ups asynchronous and then generate insights I'll choose another exercise which makes sense to bring those those uh the data those insights or the information and then turn it into insights so this is an exercise called lean coffee it's also pretty popular technique you prioritize um based on the votes maker dailies asynchronous and then the next eight minutes you talk about that and if time's up then you can either decide together that you want to continue for four minutes or no let's move on to the next topic um so I try to figure out a way to start from this I might be Challenge and then create like a cohesive story uh to get to deciding what to do because then uh yeah that's this is a really important part if you have lots of ideas and opportunities and issues that you want to solve um what are the actual actions that we're gonna take and then you see again the the same template that I showed before so the blue box it's the same as the one here but in this case we're going to create actions for the next week and the first blue box that we saw were the actions that we had previous week so here you can really flesh out what you want to do what's the desired outcome how can we see the results what's the deadline who's gonna own it and everything that you need to uh said people up for success and then I always do a checkout which is a great bridge to today's checkout um in this case I'm gonna ask you um now what so what's your next step that's something we're gonna do in in butter but before we do that um let's wrap up the topics that we covered today because uh time flies uh fast we use retrospective so smooth team collaboration in 2023 we talked about three things how to choose the right topic for an extra Pro we talked about the documents teen stages forming storming norm and Performing and how to brainstorm ideas for for possible improvements for your team in that stage then we used the hermit we question framework to um uh yeah to to rephrase the problem or the the opportunity that you see for your team into a challenge that they can solve together uh and and these two steps this is really a big part of the work in preparing retrospective uh one because once you have that and the Seven step retro framework um it's just um an exercise of putting together the the right um things to do during the workshop to get there um and it's easy to to spot um if something is not fitting into the the topic of the retrospective uh so this this is the things that we covered today uh so what um the the idea is to help our teams get one percent better every day and be 37 times more productive uh by the end of the year um so let's do the checkout in uh in butter um and then uh we cut like a couple of seconds minutes left to to um uh do a q a if possible uh so now what what's your next step what you're gonna do after this session so hopefully uh you got some inspiration to do after the session if you don't have any inspiration that's also fine then write that down do nothing but yeah go ahead [Music] um [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] so maybe we do have a couple of questions in the chat ah so I would leave the poll open and if if you still want to reflect and add to the poll but maybe we can go back to the main chat and Paul was asking is there a maximum team size for a weekly 30 minutes retro yeah so um the best um amount of people in a team is I think it's 4.

6 so if you can work with that but basically um if um I would recommend to keep it like to seven eight people Max because if you have more people in the room then there are more lines of communication and um it's going to be more difficult to get to results um that being said uh you can do like simultaneously the same formats so you could prepare like one big middle board with the similar exercises and then do breakouts sessions where smaller groups talk about the same topic but only if it makes sense uh so that's that's um if I prepare a workshop for a group of uh eight or more people then always I try to split them up into smaller rooms so that's not only to make my own life easier but it's also that you got uh more Rich conversations and uh um yeah um okay check out the post from Jan in the chat it looks pretty rad with all the yeah communication lines and it was really nice post and it's something some article also in the comment about uh the pizza rule of Amazon but I think the 4.

6 is great yeah so who are we going to cut in uh like a sixth we take turns every week like like a team would do right uh and then I was also wondering if you've played around a bit with covering some of these parts asynchronously also in the to maximize the time we have together to actually debate and bounce off ideas and you know not rush through that has how's that working yeah that's working uh really well um so especially um the first stages so uh the Icebreaker um and Gathering data um you can you can do that asynchronously most of the times and then even the next steps some of them you can also do asynchronously so that's that's the thing I love about Mido is that once you have the outline there the design of the workshop then based on how you bring it to the team a lot of things you can do asynchronously but then the challenge part is to people let people actually do the the pre-work and and do the async part but it's also a skill and a habit that you can build with your team um so what I do now a lot is um so for example next next week I'm going to do a okr workshop with a team and today I sent a video a loom video to them where I walk through the media board explain what we're going to do I have two big red arrows pre-work pre-work uh and that's that's what they have to do as pre-work and then in uh email that I sent them I include the loom video I include the media board I include direct links to the pre-work in the mirror board so if you right click a frame then you can copy a link to the frame and then you jump directly to that frame uh so there are no excuses to not do the the pre-work I included in the calendar invite it's an email I remind them again two days beforehand and maybe also what happens if they don't do the homework right yeah so that's something that's a bad thing that happens right yeah that's something I just let it happen and then they get their teammates are not happy with it so that's that's also something regarding uncomfortable situations I let I give space for that in the beginning as well if someone didn't prepare and others are maybe heard this a little bit like a big word but if others are being slowed down because of that that's something I take time for definitely in the beginning of a session and right yeah yeah we have to wrap it up we're wrapping it up but whoever has any extra questions for Arthur I'm sure he wouldn't mind are they throwing you on the bus he wouldn't mind you approaching him either on LinkedIn or staying for two or three minutes in the session but other than that we're at time uh really interesting to see what you can cover in an hour when you have a good structure so that's also kind of like also my takeaway for Retros if you have a good structure and you have a pace and time boxing you really can get things done in a short amount of time thank you for sharing your tips and your tricks and thank you everyone for joining us uh have fun experimenting with your takeaways after today's session and I will see you hopefully really really soon and if not uh yeah enjoy uh you know the end of the Year celebrations that are coming up next is everyone already in Holiday mode not yet I feel it I feel it I'm there I'm struggling oh Ben looking good thank you so much our everyone enjoy the rest of your day thank you everyone bye-bye thank you