Labcast: An Inside Look at the Retrospective Process

June 10, 2011

Would you like your organization to get better faster? This free eBook breaks down the restrospective process and how to make it work for your team. In our latest podcast, OpenView founder Scott Maxwell sits down to chat about the value of retrospectives, the challenges many companies face, and why retrospectives aren’t just for developers anymore.

An inside look at the practice of retrospectives

After the podcast, don’t forget to check out our free eBook, Get Better Faster: The Ultimate Guide to the Practice of Retrospectives.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Brendan Cournoyer: Hello everyone, and welcome to this edition of Labcast. Today, we are joined by OpenView founder Scott Maxwell to talk about our latest e-book, Get Better Faster: The Ultimate Guide to
the Practice of Retrospectives
. Scott, thanks for being here and taking the time to talk to us about this.

Scott Maxwell: Sure.

Brendan: Get better faster, that sounds great to a lot of people. I’m sure a lot of people check that out and be like, sure, I’d like to get better faster, but the practice of retrospective might be a little foreign to some people. Not everyone is really familiar with that. What can you tell us as far as where the practice of retrospectives comes from, the background, and some of the benefits that it can provide?

Scott: I think most really great organizations, great people, great teams practice this in, at least, an informal basis of just looking back in time and thinking through what happened, why did it happen, what did we want to happen, what were the differences, and try to get the learning associated with whatever action just took place. It could be as simple as a salesperson makes a phone call, gets off the phone, and thinks through what happened on that phone call. What was the result? What did I really want to have happen? Is there something I can learn from it to get better the next time I make a phone call?

Or it could be as sophisticated as I had annual goals for a year as a company. At the end of the year, what happened? Did we nail the goal? Did we not nail the goal? Essentially, what did we expect to happen, why did it happen, why didn’t it happen, what can we learn from it? So, as we go into the following year, we can think through things we might want to do differently.

From a more formal perspective, the agile software development teams have been practicing this for years. The basic idea is, particularly in scrum, at the end of a sprint, get together as a team and talk it through, ask a few questions and try to get to what are the learnings that we can take forward into the next sprint and try to do things differently.

Brendan: That’s a great point because I think a big focus for the e-book, in particular, is talking about retrospectives but not limiting it to software development, about applying it to different areas of your organization and the value in that. What can you tell us about some examples of how retrospectives can be applied to different areas for an early-stage and startup organization?

Scott: I think they can be applied pretty much everywhere. The idea of agile software development or scrum, in particular, is really an organizing set of principles around anything, not necessarily limiting it to software development. It’s been extended off to marketing as an area that, typically, teams move to next. But it can actually go organization wide, the way we practice it at OpenView. The way I think about it is, at the highest level, it’s probably annual. Set annual goals. At the end of the year do a retrospective on what happened last year. The basic questions are really what happened, what went well and why, what didn’t go well and why, and what can we do differently the following year. That can be broken down into a quarterly retrospective for looking at what happened last quarter versus goals that could be broken down into weekly, or it could be
broken all the way down into a task. Whether it’s done in software development, marketing, sales, professional services, customer service, quite frankly it doesn’t matter as much as the idea of actually trying to rigorously apply the principle of retrospectives.

Brendan: Right. I think that sounds great. I’m sure people listening might be like, hey, that sounds great, but this is a very team based and team oriented initiative. So it’s one thing to
convince yourself. Now you’ve got to convince everybody else. What are some of the challenges and some of the ways to get around implementing something new like this into an organization? It’s certainly a topic that’s covered in pretty great detail in the e-book, but what can you tell us about that?

Scott: I think it’s difficult. I think, at an individual level, it takes a lot of discipline as an individual to do ongoing retrospective of how you’re doing and what you’re trying to achieve or what you’re achieving. As you get to a team level, it gets even more difficult, because now there’s a larger number of people that would be involved in the retrospective. My overarching sense is that it becomes a lot easier once you’ve practiced them for a while and you actually generate some results. Until you get to that point, it’s much, much more
difficult to get the team together to try to get them to practice retrospectives, to get to the point where you actually have some tangible things that you’ve done differently that actually benefit the team. When you get to that point, it becomes a lot easier to practice retrospectives. Until that
point, it’s a lot of cajoling, a lot of really trying to herd cats, depending on your organization.

Brendan: There are some other challenges and issues too, certainly. Even after you’ve been practicing it for a while, you might get to a point where you’re just not seeing the value that you want to see out of the retrospective process. That’s another hurdle to jump and get over and figure out a way around. Another issue
that’s definitely covered in the e-book. But what are some things you can tell us about getting around some of those issues?

Scott: I think the largest issue is that you can go through the motions of practicing retrospectives, but going through the motions actually doesn’t get you the best result. What gets you the best result is trying to get the team together and figure out what really could we do differently that’s going to make our work lives a lot easier. One of the big issues that I find is that it’s hard for people to actually be completely transparent.

It’s hard for people to go into a room and for one person to say, if this person stopped doing this, then my work life would be a lot easier. People have various reasons that they want to withhold complete and utter honesty from an overall organization. Quite frankly, it’s hard. It takes a lot of work to step back and really say, “All right, what are we really not doing that well?” People generally like to talk about what they’re doing well and like to talk a lot less about what are the issues that we’ve got that we can actually address and get a lot better at what we’re doing.

I think it takes an incredible amount of facilitation to try to pull out of people what they’re really thinking and what is really troubling them or what they actually think is going really well and they’d like to do more of. The best point I can make is to try to put real effort into having a real open dialogue going. It’s really more moments of clarity and transparency that take place, if you work really hard at it. If you have those moments a few weeks or a few months in a row, you’re still likely to fall out of it. You’re likely to fall into a trap of, okay, we’ve got to do this meeting. Let’s get in a room, let’s get through the meeting. That doesn’t really get you to the absolute right point, because people, therefore, want to get through the meeting and having this real open dialogue takes some real work from everybody in the room.

The best sessions I’ve seen are when at least one person, but hopefully more than one person, walks in the room and they really want to have an open conversation. Quite frankly, sometimes it’s the most senior person in the room or the most powerful person in the room, if you will, that needs to actually demonstrate and model the openness and maybe throw on the table some of the things that that person thinks they might be doing that they could be doing less of that might improve team performance. Or otherwise causing a distraction or something so that other people around the table get the sense that, hey, let’s be completely open here and let’s throw everything else we’ve got on the table.

To some extent, in my mind, the practice of retrospectives actually is a formal mechanism for people to have to bring forward the issues that they wouldn’t normally bring forward because they’d rather not discuss them in their normal work lives. The practice of retrospectives really gives them a forum where not only are the able to talk about the issues that could be addressed to create better performance, but they’re required
to talk about the issues that could create better performance. The more people are feeling like they’re supposed to do that, the more it gives them a great vehicle to do that.

Brendan: Once again, for more information on the practice of retrospectives, be sure to check out our full e-book, Get Better Faster: The Ultimate Guide to the Practice of Retrospectives. Thanks very much again, Scott. We’ll be talking to you again soon.

Scott: All right, Brendan. Thanks.

Content Strategist

Brendan worked at OpenView from 2011 until 2012, where he was an editor, content manager and marketer. Currently Brendan is the Vice President of Corporate Marketing at <a href="https://www.brainshark.com/">Brainshark</a> where he leads all corporate marketing initiatives related to content, creative, branding, events, press and analyst relations, and customer marketing.