As a teacher, my wife had to step in to avoid a conflict among sixth graders at school. She told me that she would let her students come up with different solutions on how to solve this conflict the following day. I mentioned briefly that she, in this particular case, could use a retrospective technique I have used in several occasions, prioritizing with dots, and let her students vote for the solution they would prefer.
It slipped my mind for a while, I didn’t even go into details when I mentioned it, but a couple of days later she told me she actually had tried this technique out on her students. Some minor adjustments was necessary to make it more suitable for sixth graders and a chalkboard, but in essence it was the same technique.
She found the results surprising. While she expected the majority to vote for asking an adult for help, and at lower age they probably would, the majority voted for a certain way of solving this on their own – without adult intervention.
Instead of taking the answer for granted she generated new valuable insight of how her students think – and she only spent a few minutes totally. In addition she might have found the tipping point when children start behaving like adults in terms of conflict resolution.
For those of us who embrace agile development, we might find some inspiration in this to bring back to your workplace.
Retrospective can be successfully applied at any age and with all kinds of people, just remember to adapt it to your audience. Even the smallest effort can generate valuable feedback, and you might be surprised of what you find. This can help you improve your team.
My wife tested a new retrospective technique amazingly fast – with almost no preparation. It seems to me that they have a great environment allowing them to experiment. If they make a mistake, they get immediate feedback from theirs students and take a different approach next time. This is an important agile principle, find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again.
Create a climate in your organization that allow people to experiment and innovate, make sure there’s time to do this. Break a few rules. Take a step outside your normal boundaries and seek inspiration elsewhere, for instance see how they use visualization in a first grade classroom – the prototype for a creative learning environment. Some elements might be useful for your agile wall.
Question: Have you ever been inspired by something you have discovered elsewhere, outside your normal domain, and brought it back into your team? And how did it go?
Disclaimer: This blogpost was originally published on a different platform. Formatting may be incorrect, links may be out of date.
Jørn Hunskaar 