Sparking Change through Scaled Retrospectives

“If you ask questions about the past, it’s always about going to a corpse and opening it up... If you ask questions about the future, it’s always about values" -  Nikolaos Kaintantzis

“Are you all dumb?” When a senior stakeholder dropped that bombshell mid-retro, chaos threatened to derail everything. In this episode of SPCs Unleashed, Mark, Ali, Stephan, and Niko reflect on what makes art-level retros truly transformative. Spoiler: It’s a balance of authentic emotion, precise data, and a willingness to experiment with new formats.

Key Highlights

• Data as a Compass: Mark argues that each retro needs measurable goals or it slides into empty talk.
• Controlled Chaos: Stephan highlights the value of quick reflection moments before huge problems boil over.
• Offbeat Creativity: Ali and Niko champion “the James Bond approach,” metaphors, and playful prompts that unlock honest feedback.
• Facilitation Matters: Big groups require multiple moderators, as no single person can handle tears, confusion, or conflict alone.
• Action is King: From budget constraints to final approvals, no outcome will stick without leadership buy-in and resource allocation.

Actionable Insights

• Focus on Real Tension: Don’t shy away from conflict; friction often drives breakthroughs if handled professionally.
• Vary Your Timing: Pick ad-hoc retros for urgent crises and scheduled ones for deeper reflection.
• Measure, Then Improve: Use metrics to confirm progress; otherwise, your next retro may feel like a hollow repeat.

Conclusion

Retrospectives aren’t a cozy chat—they’re a critical lever for cultural and operational gains. Whether dealing with emotional blow-ups or nailing down the data to validate success, this episode offers a roadmap for art-level retros that genuinely deliver.

References

Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen

Transcript

Mark Richards: 0:01

You're listening to SPCs unleashed a shaping agility project that emerged from the 2023 Prague safe summit. The show is hosted by Swiss SPC, T Stephan Nick and Niko kaintances, Dutch, spct, Ali Hajou and Aussie safe fellow, Mark Richards. We're committed to helping SPCs grow their impact and move beyond the foundations. Taught during implementing safe each week, we explore a dimension from the frameworks competencies. We share stories about our journeys, the secrets we found and the lessons we learned the hard way. G'day and welcome to another episode of SPCs unleashed. I'm very much warmed up for this today because I had a text from well, she's a friend now. She's been a client in the past who went, Oh, I've just watched one of your recent episodes, and I recognize my teams in it. So I'm all excited, but I'm also super excited because for the first time ever this week, we're not talking about a topic we picked. We are talking about a topic that somebody who's been watching or listening picked, and Niko, you were the one that got the the Can you please do it? And then volunteered to be our host today. So I'm going to throw it across to you, yeah, and

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 1:15

you'll see how great backlogs are, and how good is when you don't start everything and just finish things, because it was just the next thing on the backlog. When, when the colleague wrote, when I have this topic? We had one in the pipeline, and that's now the next one. So in 10 days, the topic is here on the show, and the suggested topic was about retros on art level. What do you do? There learnings we can have? And yeah, and that's our topic. And I would like go directly to you and ask, Ali, what is your passion? Special moment, surprise, challenge, what's a yeah, what's in the topic for you? So

Ali Hajou: 1:54

with the retrospectives, I have a little bit of a sort of a non controversial view, I think, because I really think that the retrospective is much more of a or can be used much more as a team bonding type of meeting session, moment in which we can focus on the struggle that, You know, we just go through trying to fix complex problems, and, you know, just going through the week. And I think there's, there's so much opportunity to to to to just focus on that, and the focus on the struggle, and focus on how to maybe alleviate the struggle, but accept the struggle. And, you know, the retrospect, and we're going to talk about that more later on, the retrospective has this tendency to become very robotic, whether it's on the level of the team, or whenever we pull that to the train level or even higher. But I think with a small little twist, it becomes much more of a human reflection session. And typically it is not that, let's say, you know, what we are used to from the books is that, you know, we're in retrospect, we're talking about our way of working, and we're going to talk about what to keep and what to improve and what to remove, and that kind of stuff. I think I disagree. I'd like to reflect on very specific challenges that we went through. Gossip a little bit on it, and, you know, just gain collective understanding about the difficulties and but also the nice parts of, let's say, going together through some difficulty. So talk a little bit more about that cool.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 3:44

This from a country where weed is legal. Thank you. Ali Stephan,

Stephan Neck: 3:49

yeah, Ali is a true soul mate. I liked what you said. It's about the social system, and it's not about an agenda. It's about attitude, right? We as a group, we as people looking back and learn fast in the context we are, that's what I like, and not going through an agenda bragging about some cost or whatever, if it's not leading to some some actionable stuff that we agree on, that we as a social system are happy With, or that we have a consent or a consensus, whatever. That's what I'm looking for.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 4:26

Cool. And what resonated with me, what Ali said, is the mechanics. Sometimes I'm see people say, Okay, I'm doing safe, I'm doing strong or whatever. And they think retro is exactly at this point. It's a cadence. I do it then and then and then. And my passion is when people are realizing I can do a retro post mortems, problem solving workshops, whenever they make sense. And that's an environment I would like, I would like to be. So do it whenever you need them. And the other thing where my passion is when I see that the people who moderate Rachels that they focusing. Other only on the show, but they're focusing on action items that are actionable, so they are able to do something on this another, it's a two hour show, one and a half hour show, and then at the end, everybody's excited, but nothing happens. And I remember one of our retros, by the way, it was when this show was 90 minutes long. And then we did the retro and I remember a really cool one by Mark, and I'm really looking forward that you share us your passion. Mark, well, I

Mark Richards: 5:31

want to start with my passion is action. And, you know, there's a nice little segue from from you Niko, but I couldn't resist playing back to comments Ali and Stephan made, like, if there's one overriding passion I have with retros, it's to get people to never, ever run the what went well, what didn't go well, what puzzled me retro and, you know, I had people walk up to me going, I didn't do a proper retro because I didn't do that one. So there's a passion for me of you know, hand crafting retros. But the super passion is, you know, you've wasted your time. If nothing changes because of it, exactly,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 6:09

do you want to tell us more? Mark about data? I think it's one of your other passions.

Mark Richards: 6:15

Uh, look, it's definitely and this probably leads me a little bit away from special passions into, you know, perhaps, what other kinds of retros? Because if you think about, as soon as somebody says, What about retros on the art level, the instant reaction is, you go, well, that's inspect and adapt, right? And I, the longer life goes by, the more that I drop, inspect and adapt. And, you know, I'm sure there are people out there in the safe world going, we're going to disbar you and take away your fellow right now. But for me, there's a huge aspect of an effective retro is that you're using data. But if you think about where the whole idea of the retro came from, it came from, you know, lean Kaizen, you know. And if you look anywhere near lean, if you look near what Toyota does, it's all Passion, Passion, passion for data structure. And the first thing they'll say is not every problem is worth solving, so we need data to tell us the you know, impact of the problem, so we can pick the right problems to invest effort in. And then, if you're changing something, you want to know that you've made it better. And so you need data to actually be able to measure the impact of the change you've made. And you know, the thing that I love about something like an inspect and adapt is you get a whole bunch of people in the room, so you get multiple perspectives. The thing that I hate is that you don't really often have data. You have people sticking post its up and, you know, opinion becomes data. And if you're going to get into a habit of routine, you know, action coming out of this stuff, and actually being able to demonstrate the difference that you're making. You've got to develop data disciplines and, and I find the the kind of, you know, once every three months we'll all get into a room for a problem solving session, often doesn't lend itself to that kind of rigor. Cool software,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 8:22

you know, I just want to go back to the retro we did together after, I think, six episodes with the old format, and it was really full of data. And it was so surprised how much data you can get out of a system. So for the audience, for instance, we've seen how much time somebody speaks on these episodes. How long these people speak, was there a monolog more than such, such amount of minutes or seconds? And what's really cool to have such a retro so I never had one such database. So that's why I asked you this question about data and and your idea without data, just opinions. Get Data and there's not the best, the best thing. So let's, let's go to the first question about about the retros. And I would like to know, what do you do next to inspect and adapt. We heard from Mark already something. What do you do next? Then just inspect and adapt to normal retros. Ali,

Ali Hajou: 9:13

so you know, I've, I've, I like the job that I have, not because of the ideas that I create, but the ideas that other people that I work with create. So in the context, you know, doing things by the book just doesn't work. So in the context, people create an alternative love that. So the idea of retrospective is still there, even though the execution is different, a couple of the training that I coach came up with their own version, which is actually something that is done next to the inspect and adapt. The inspect and adapt is, you know, usually done in one form or another, all the way at the end of the BI of course. But. Throughout the PI they've hosted something that they call the gay session, which is a Dutch pronunciation of the abbreviation k, e, i, standing for keep each other informed. And the way we mention it is the guy session. The Kai session is, it's a little bit of a blend between a retrospective and a system demo, but it's it's structured in a way, but it's also not structured in a way. It's really about, is there anything out there that you've been busy with that you think might be useful for others. So let's keep each other informed. So it's a little bit of a demo, but it's not so much related to, you know, the your the results of last sprint or the integrated results of last sprint. It's much more free format. But the let's say the main through line in the K session is that there is something out there that you've been busy with, passionate about, interested in whatever, but that might be interesting for others. And that last part is sort of what distinguish, what distinguishes whatever is being presented over there. And it's been the most visited session throughout the entire PI next to the PI, planning, inspect and adapt is difficult. They're, you know, they're fine. You're people find all kind of place to ways to, you know, be minimally involved, or to do whatever, all kind of creative ways, system demos, same thing. You know, a few stakeholders are interested in this kind of stuff. So, oh well, I'm still busy with something else. So nothing. It's not nothing for me. Well, we all heard those kind of things, but the case session packed everybody there. Why? Because we have engineers having the opportunity to share in detail, sort of the the ideas that they have, the constraints that they have, the new materials that they're using, the new technologies that they're using, which is, I don't know, I found it fantastic, cool.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 12:18

Let's go from a format that sounds like a Mars technique to Stephan,

Stephan Neck: 12:24

I like the build up that Ali just conveyed, like if we are talking ina on an art level, the question is, how do you build up to such an event? And for me, when I sat down and during preparation time, I was lazy, I used safe copilot, what's beside Ina, or what's on that level, and he comes up with different things building up to the INA, and one is the artsync. And I've learned a lot during the last years with with some of our clients. We use the art sync like what you just described, Ali, for follow up meetings, fast and appropriate feedback. If the artsync is done the wrong way, it's like we are just reporting progress and not talking to each other. What is the achievement of goals? How do we build that up. What are the indications? And for example, in all things, we always start with a confidence vote, compared to the last week. Is the tendency stable? Is it going up? Is it going down? And that then triggers the discussion for what is continuous or relentless improvement. And some stuff has to be done very fast. Could be a K session, could be a follow up meeting, whatever is needed. And sometimes we find out end of the PI we don't need the IND because we have done it on the go. And appropriate and fast feedback is much more valuable than just waiting 10 weeks, 12 weeks for an eye and they do the problem statement, stuff like that. Why not doing it immediately? Cool. Mark,

Mark Richards: 14:08

so I'm going to talk about a couple of things that I've found myself doing, and I'm going to go all the way back nearly 15 years ago, when I started thinking about scaled retros, and I played with a thing that we call the bubble up retro. And what we started getting every team to do is say, when you finish your retro, what are the, you know, two or three things coming out of your retro that are most impactful or most urgently in need of attention. And then we would hold a art level retro straight after it. And what we do is we get every team to bring the two or three things that they bubbled up. And at that point we had multiple teams. We had our leadership involved. We had a different perspective. We go, Okay, this is what's hot. This is what's coming from every team. It's happening every two weeks. And so we started to get that because as soon as I think about art level Retro. Retro what I'm thinking about is, how do I get a broader perspective than a single team in terms of insight into the problem, but also leverage in terms of the solution? So the bubble ups were a thing for me. Another thing that I look at is chapter based retros. I almost routinely used chapters. So I've got some kind of craft based group, and introducing chapter retros is super powerful. Because if you think about it, and I think there's a trap a lot of people fall into of going a retro is always about fixing a process, right? And if a retro is always about fixing a process, then a for one thing, all of your engineers are going to get very sick of retros, because, you know, who cares about fixing processes? If you're an engineer, I want to, I want to write better code.

Ali Hajou: 15:51

And on top of that, there's probably quite a few processes that you cannot do anything about. Yeah,

Mark Richards: 15:56

right. So, so could it be, hey, there's a bit of tech debt we should be dealing with, right? We keep stumbling over this particular problem. Whenever we touch this, it blows up or, you know, something's going wrong in our regression sweep. Why does our regression sweep keep being ignored when it generates a lot of failures? You know, that chance to dig in and say it's a problem, it's not necessarily a process problem, that might be a practice problem, might be a skill based problem, and putting different groups together, same thing, if you think about, you know, a PIR, right? If I'm releasing, you know, let's say I'm releasing two or three times a PI. Can I do a retro after every release, because I love doing a retro in the moment. You know, it's not six weeks later and you're all trying to remember what happened. It's in the moment. Hey, we just did a release. What can we learn from it? How can the next release be a better release? So getting to that in the moment, different collections of people, and pointing the right kinds of problems to the right kinds of collections of people. That's my favorite way of starting to think about varying art level retros. So

Ali Hajou: 17:09

if I may, because I'm actually not a fan of the pretty ad hoc or potential pretty ad hoc retrospectives, because I've I just, I want to, I want to, I want to know your experience. Uh, all three of you, I've seen it go. It goes wrong very quickly before you know it. You know, at be after any issue, problem, annoyance, you know what? Let's organize a retrospective so at random, you know, just, and people are like, Ah, come on, please. Man, I just, you know, I have this thing to finish, you know, I have a meeting in a bit. Come on. Man, it's just, it becomes such a, you know, these ad hoc, you know, out of the blue retrospectives. I mean, I don't know how to call it, if it becomes a, if it becomes a habit, I feel that it, it's that's what makes you know it would generates annoyance with people. I

Stephan Neck: 18:08

hear you, Ali, but let me use a picture. If you are in a room and it gets hotter and steamier, you might feel that, I assume, and Mark can correct me, you're not talking about immediately doing a retro because it's getting hotter or steamier in the room, but if it starts condensation on the wall, or you even have mold on it, then you immediately you should go into something, an ad hoc retro, if it doesn't build up, if it doesn't show, if it's not tangible, because it's an assumption. It's just an opinion in the room. I I'm with you, Ali, but Mark, what's, what's the secret sauce?

Mark Richards: 18:49

So I think the first thing I'm going to say is, any retro that doesn't produce action has been a waste of many people's time, right? Right? So whether your ad hoc plan or anything else, if you're holding retros that don't produce action and that people can't see the system change because the time they invest in the retro, you know it's not going to be good. The flip side to that is, I find a lot of and particularly if you imagine teams, is an easy example. I reckon if you went out and you found 1000 teams who'd all been agile teams for at least a year, and you surveyed them and said, How many of you are still doing a retro every sprint? The percentage would be pretty small. But, and if you then surveyed all the team members and said, how much value do you find in your retros, the percentage would be value like vanishing, right? Because that's the trend. And I've often gone actually, you know what? Let's cancel these retros that you do on a routine basis, right? In favor of picking retros that we think are going to produce something tangible. It's not you going in the room every two weeks to whinge about the same stuff you winged about two weeks ago, which is what a lot of Retro. Those are, for a lot of people, it's going there's a point to it, and we can do something meaningful and actually craft it. And you know, if I'm doing a retro for a chapter, I want to do root cause analysis. I've got a problem that I think the chapter is the best thing to solve, right? Get the chapter to go and do the root cause analysis, gather the data, you know, approach a structured resolution. So that's kind of the trade off for me, is, as often as not, I kill the regular stuff in favor of not so much ad hoc as event based.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 20:38

I don't know how else with the audience. At the moment, my synapses have a five work have so many ideas and things that now happen in my brain. I'm some kind in between. So I have my regular events and I have my record retros, but I think when something important happens, you should clarify it now so the house is burning, you don't wait until it's time to do something. You do it immediately. And I think, I think, Ali, one important thing for me is it shouldn't be like a wedding planning. So doing a talker doesn't mean you need now all everything and catering and whatever. So it could really be between this retro so what I'm doing a lot is, is the problem solving workshop from inspector adapt, which we know from safe or which was all already known already as we should cover the fishbone and the five wires, etc, always took parts of it whenever we had, for instance, in a coach sync or in a posync. We did this event afterwards, which was also good training, because people forget about the tools, how, how they work, if they do it so often. So I understand both, both sides and one of my, my lousiest retro, or was it was a sequence of retros and sprint after sprint. It was, it was during scrum time, not during a safe time, sprint after sprint, the engagement went down, and people get bored. And like Mark said before, people don't want to show up. And was really one of the My worst retros, or retro seasons, and to start thinking of myself, Okay, what's happened? Why is this step away? And what I learned is wasn't about the format, because at starting buying books like the one for my master Derby, and then somebody told me, Oh, there's a retro mod. Just do something that's energizing fun. I realized those days it wasn't about fun and about about having new formats. It was about that the retro had no clear outcome. So we decided something like, we need word piece world peace. And then after two weeks, we just forgot about because we had the chance to change it. So we had action items far, far, far away from the team's influence. And that's why I never showed at the beginning of the retro, I just said, Okay, let's make a new one, because the old goals were stupid. And then I realized it's not about the process or to make it funnier, more engagement. It's about having action items at the end, and it's something you said you said already. So I would like to know from your side, yeah, what is, what was your worst retro and what was your learning out of it? Let

Stephan Neck: 23:19

me be a bit mean and play the devil's advocate, right? Worst retros, and we already tackled it a little bit, were those kumbaya style retros feeling nice, touchy feely, talking about, how did we experience that, and not having data, right? So being too conciliatory, eager to compromise, keep the comfort zone. I don't like them, and what I've learned, and I'm pretty strict in that you either stand firm, you tackle a problem, you have the data, or if you don't leave, find another way, find another occasion. Otherwise it's kumbaya time. And as one of the clients, they pick that up, and team members are using this keyword, Kumbaya. It's not what we want. Let's change the retro style or the topic we are talking about. Thank you. Stephan

Ali Hajou: 24:18

Ali, I have this exact same thing. I call it these very soft retrospectives. The thing is, I mean, I'm saying this way too fast. I've learned to be a little bit careful here. There are some, you know, there are people that, for very good reason, they need these type of conversations just to be to feel welcome and to be to feel part of a team. It's not my style at all. But there are people that that that need to be able to express how they feel and whatsoever. And I I also feel that that is a. Yeah, and I'm saying this as a millennial, born in 87 generations that have been born after me, have much more tendency to, you know, need to express themselves for very good reasons, and not doing that or being very hard to that is just actually very counterproductive, and I've seen that going wrong many, many times. But you know, if you ask me, I'd like to have a more action based, kind of short, effective retrospective, almost military style, yes, sir, absolutely. Ma'am, definitely. Ma'am. And we continue to do work,

Mark Richards: 25:40

right? So I'm going to be the odd guy out here and go, I don't mind a little bit of Kumbaya. And I think a little bit of kumbaya is good in terms of, you know, what's happening in the culture. But if you're going to go near feelings, the first thing you've got to know is, if you're the facilitator, are you able to cope? But do you have the toolkit to cope when strong feelings are in the room? Yes. And I instantly had flashbacks. As soon as you guys started originally, I went, I can't even remember, because I just go, every retro that didn't have action was a bad retro. And then you guys started talking, I went, Oh, I just had a flashback, because I loved, you know, the tool that taught me more than any other tool about retros was Esther Darby and Diana Larsen book agile retrospectives. It's this beautiful toolbox. And, you know, Esther doesn't really say, do a kumbaya retro, but she has a bit that says, actually, you should spend a few minutes in kumbaya land. And you know, one of the things that she talks about is doing appreciations and having a moment where you go express appreciation for each other, and that kind of positioned early in the agenda starts to open people up and enable you to lean into perhaps some tougher discussions when you get to the not come by our part of it, and I love doing that kind of stuff, but I did this with this, this group, and it was, it was probably the most powerful set of scale retros that I ever ran, right the amount of change that came out of them was ridiculous, and that's its own long story. But we basically designed this same agenda, and we had every team in the art run a three hour retrospective to the same agenda. We bubble up out of those. We did a pattern based analysis, and then we took the pattern based analysis from the bubble up, and we had the leadership look after that. And boy, did we get big change. But part of this whole thing, I designed these kumbaya moments of appreciations look after that and and, boy, did we get big change going. You know, let's, let's get good at appreciating each other and both giving and receiving appreciation. And then it turns out that this particular team was about to lose two thirds of its members, right? And they knew it was happening. They actually thought they were coming to this retro for the news to become public. They had assumed the retro invitation was a disguise and and I'm in there, and I hadn't realized that all this was going on. And I'm taking them into this deep, touchy feely, Kumbaya time of appreciating each other, and there's tears everywhere, and people going when you mark yesterday, we just found out that, you know, all these people getting fired, and I just didn't have the equipment to deal with a room full of people crying in a corporate workspace. So, yeah, be careful about your Kumbaya. But it's important to have a little bit of

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 28:45

it speaking about emotions Ali,

Ali Hajou: 28:48

you know, it's short little example of not a kumbaya moment where I distinctly remember this was during COVID times, you know, these big, very structured, remote pi plannings that I like to organize. Everything was super smooth, just beautiful. And we had all types of, I should not call it work instructions, but you know, agreements on who speaks, when and what way, what are the topics that we discuss? And all the way at the I think this was a draft line review teams were being presented, presenting their BI objectives, their struggles and the risks that they foresee, blah, blah, blah. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, it's with a stakeholder, very senior stakeholder, you know, unmutes himself. Actually, he didn't have as his microphone muted throughout the entire time. You just could hear him grumbling in the back. And then he just lashed out. He's and he mentioned in, you know, a remote pi planning. What am I saying? It was. To I was the remote pilot. There was an inspector adapt, sorry, in a remote inspect and adapt with the entire train there. Like, are you all dumb?

Stephan Neck: 30:11

Wow, with,

Ali Hajou: 30:12

you know, 120 3040, 50 people I don't know anymore, in in the call. Are you all dumb? And the silence that came behind it was just, you know, it's talking about retrospectives that have action. This one had an action. It was actually an escalation from the entire train to the board about the behavior of this specific stakeholder. I've never had that before. That was a very active, action oriented, let's say, Ina, but it also destroyed the INA in its current format the next time. So we had to, we had to figure out a way to still incorporate the stakeholders without them being able to scream out, yeah,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 31:03

yeah. And you mentioned something that's really difficult. What do you do with emotions remote so if you are in the room, you can try to handle, try to take the people go in a different, different room. What happened once with me Boston and retro was in a normal meeting that somebody starts, starts crying, and just say, I will not join anymore, and removed. And then it's difficult there, there are at home, etc. So as Mark said, You, you, if you, if you go to a place where people should express emotion, you should be able to handle them. And I'm not sure if everybody, of us, in general, not of us, four of us, can handle things remote. And it was really hard to find out, okay, what we do now to be careful for the person, or do we let the person alone? It was difficult because now, because she just disappeared. Yeah,

Stephan Neck: 31:54

Niko, may I quickly pick up that thread and bring in one or two ideas when I was talking to Mark and Eric, I remember that no matter what you do, if you're in PI planning retros, whatever, it is very beneficial to have observers. So if you organize a retro, it's preparation, it's facilitation, but if you are occupied as a facilitator, you probably can't observe. So I said, I'm the devil's advocate. I don't like Kumbaya, but as Mark said, Yes, we have to consider that. And if I'm not very firm in that, there's probably HR business partners, there's other people joining me, helping me, getting the most out of whatever type of retro I have. That's one of the the learnings, the deep learnings I had. I don't have to do everything alone. Do it in pairs, by the way. It builds in quality. It helps a lot.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 32:53

You already got one of the best practices, which was asked by by by the person who gave us a topic. It was about the best practice, and I love this one. Don't be alone in such a moment because you are not able to see everything, feel everything. Know where your areas are, your blind spots are, and have people who are able to fill up these blind spots. I really love this that you have peers that see things, feel things, because you are moderating and not see everything. Let's go to a fun a much more funner part now, because now we are a little bit sad, because the emotions thing, let's go the jiggles in the mid of the episode. This time I thought about, hmm, forces. There are many forces going in inspect and adapt part. So if retros, on the art level, where a force a force in the Pi which one would they be? Who wants to start? Eeny meeny, miny

Mark Richards: 33:49

moe. Ali. Ali.

Ali Hajou: 33:53

Is that how it works? Okay, got it. I'll shut up. No. If retrospectives on a train level were a force, which force would it be? Come on, Niko, like sort of a brain breaker, questions that you come up with, I thought of the gravitational force because, as I mentioned earlier, retrospectives as a moment to sort of Team bond, you know, reflect on the struggle of just going through problem solving, it's it brings you back, you know, you might jump or you might deviate, but eventually the gravitational force, it brings you back to some form of a central point. And so when, when I read your question as like, Huh? It's, it brings you back to the core. It reconnects us, hence the gravitational force,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 34:50

oh, grounds you back. Okay, cool, Stephan,

Stephan Neck: 34:54

let's, let's stay into the physics dimension. Um. Something that accompanies me for many months and years now is if you are in that social system, creating systems, you have centrifugal forces and centripetal forces. If you give autonomy, if you do stuff, you tend to deviate the way, right. And if you think about a slingshot, right? The faster you spin, the faster you go, the more centrifugal force you have. What keeps us in line is leadership. A century petal force, but the more autonomy you give and you have, the more centripetal force you need to keep us aligned, to keep us on track. And the retrospective is part of that for me, right, not flying away in outer space, but keeping us as a social system, on track

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 35:56

cool. So without retro, we just fly away.

Stephan Neck: 36:00

You have to fly. But the question is, Is it, is it the right path, or are you just flying away, away, nowhere, and not reaching your destination?

Mark Richards: 36:10

Cool, Mark, so you guys all went physical, and Let's

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 36:16

Get Physical though

Mark Richards: 36:19

I went, isn't it nice that Niko gave us mythological because that let me have a very fun conversation with chatgpt, as I do every week for the original and so I went up in the mythological space with the river sticks, which, if you're not up on your Greek mythology like Niko would be, is the boundary of the underworld. And the whole idea of the river sticks is it can either propel souls forward into transformation or trap them in eternal stagnation. And when I think about retros, you know, amazing retros create new worlds, right? You find the most important levers to pull on. You pull on those levers and you change your world. And they can be transformational. But too many people have retros that are actually sitting on the stagnation site. They go through the motions. Nothing ever really changes. So the river sticks

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 37:15

perfect. And if Dear audience, if you want to do the question or answer the question yourself, I had the second prompt, which was a force can be physical, natural or mythological, so that there was a what Mark mentioned. In my case, I went to friction, because with friction, that creates energy, creates warmness, heat, whatever,

Ali Hajou: 37:38

so creates blisters,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 37:41

exactly exactly, and you see the both sides of a retro of the one side. If you have too much friction, the machine can be broken, and then you can destroy something. But without friction, you're not able to walk, not able to run. So imagine we didn't have friction, your shoe will just glide away and you will just stay in one position, and that was after much, much thinking, I came up. So the questions are also difficult for myself. And so the I have the answer, then the question I torture myself too. By the way, I like, I like the things I heard. I heard also something about from you Stephan, about leadership, bring, bringing people also back. It's always part of the leadership. If you go to leadership or general, everybody who is in a participates in a, in a retro. How do we ensure that leaders are engaged, actively engaged? How do we ensure that people are engaged?

Mark Richards: 38:40

So I gotta jump in with, for me, probably the first and biggest piece of advice, which is really fresh in my head from a big workshop I ran this week, which wasn't a retro, but it's have a facilitation team. But if you're thinking about art level, quite often, you're talking about a scale of retrospective. Therefore you're talking about large groups of people often separated into breakouts. Actually, if you want anything, you'll separate them into breakouts. And if you're only one person, you can't be everywhere at once. And you know, a good retrospective is going to delve into some pretty challenging areas, and you need a facilitation presence there to to make sure the journey is a good one. So you know, if we take inspect and adapt as perhaps the really easy one to prep for the first time, if I'm helping an art prepare for their first inspect and adapt, the first thing I do is that I run a session probably about a week before the inspect and adapt where I go. I need a set of facilitators. And you know, the classic people I'll get will be scrub masters. But it's not always just the Scrum Masters. I sit there and I go, Okay, I think I'm going to have, you know, 10 breakout groups that may inspect and adapt. Therefore, I'm going to need 10 prepared facilitators. We do, like, a three hour workshop where we take them through the fishbone and I. Actually facilitate them through a fishbone, five wires, etc, myself, but also pausing to go, Okay, well, we just facilitated doing the fishbone. Well, what did you notice about the way we tackled the fishbone? You know, what are the things to watch out for? So we do that whole preparation, and then, you know, my job, when I'm there, supporting the inspector adapt. I'm not facilitating them. I'm running around supporting the team of facilitators, and it's the effort you place into training the facilitators to make sure that every breakout group's got the facilitation that can take them through using the tools, but also navigating the challenge in the conversation is absolutely critical. So that's probably at least one for me.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 40:44

Yeah. And if you look for help versus what I can Can, can tell you, people with a Lean Six Sigma belt are also great in doing inspect and adapt sessions or problem solving workshops. They learn the fish bone, they Chicago, they learn the five whys. So if you need people look also outside the HR bubble, there are people who are able to drill and go deep finding problems. Stephan, that's interesting.

Stephan Neck: 41:11

I'm picking up the curveball for mark the right people in the room talking about the right stuff, and I remember having an argument with RTEs at the customers for the first inspect and adapt. And in one case, we said we won't have an inspect and adapt first pi, because first we have to clean up. We have to bring our continuous delivery pipeline to a certain level before we can talk about inspect and adapt, do your chores, and from then, try to raise the bar. And they said, Yeah, but save says you have to have an inspect and adapt. And I said, Okay, what's the goal? What do you want to achieve? Do you want to put more cognitive load on the people and still having a crappy continuous delivery pipeline. No, okay, do the math. The other one was that in you were asking Niko, how do you bring leaders in as well? Okay, we need leadership attention. They all try it. The business owners, for sure, should be there, and one of the techniques, or generic methods I learned from ingenious people is all choose new shoes, swap position, swap role, and prepare people for that role and do an ina or do a retro in different roles, or having a good preparation doing doing the INA, and you have those bubbly people talking all the time, and one of the facilitators I observed said, Okay, now you take my role. I take your role, and the bubbly person had to look after the group and couldn't in check only her voice and her ideas. So old shoes, new shows, something I really find helpful for preparation, but also within the different retrospectives. So

Mark Richards: 43:11

I think the one thing I'd add, and I love the old shoes, new shows, by the way back to that, the right paper in their own I think for me, I very often when I think about retrospectives. I think about series of workshops. There's a temptation, if you think art retro is, oh, I've gotta plug lots of people into the room at once. But when you're looking for more significant retrospectives, sometimes it's good to go. You know what? I'm gonna and, you know the bubble UPS an example, right? I'm gonna get a smaller group together to generate some stuff, and then I'm potentially going to have a gap in time, which enables me, let's say I've done a bubble up. I've had every team, and I've gone to every team and go, if we wanted to double our throughput, what's the one thing that what the one magic button you could push that would would help that to happen? And I got some stuff out from them in terms of the problem to solve, and I picked, okay, it feels like the teams were putting here buy me three days to go and gather data on that and then pull a new group together for the second part of the retro. And it could be that that new group, the second group, has some leadership in it, but also it could be, depending on the problem that's bubbled out of the first group, I'll actually shift who's in the room for the second one, because I've used the first one to understand which topic we're going to go deep on. So don't feel like and I think inspecting that can be a little bit of a trap here. It's like everybody in the room at once for a certain period of time, and you're done, as opposed to going, you know, let's have a session. Let's generate some ideas. Let's do some digging, generate some data, recompose, rejoin and thread it together. Niko, back to you, mate, I

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 44:48

just want to make a post to see if somebody has to say something more about before we go to the last question. This is something you want to share. Some tips.

Mark Richards: 44:57

I assume our last question you're talking about. Is advice for a young SPC, exactly.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 45:02

That's a final question. Do we have something in between? Because the next question will be, do you have advice for young SPCs or even RTS?

Stephan Neck: 45:11

Maybe, maybe one add on, summarizing what we discussed so far is, don't do copy paste, find unconventional, appropriate formats, and it should be your own format, because you delved, you deep, dived into the context, right? And books might help. Formats might help. But listening to mark, it's finding new ways, right? The evidence shows up. Somehow you have the condensation on the wall. If it's worse, you see some mold short prep, get people around you to support you, like observers, like people covering your insufficiencies, and then immediate retro, even during pi I'm not waiting for an RNA, if not needed, and I might even skip the INA at the end, because we have done the job, and we can transition into IP iteration, preparing for the next Po. The

Mark Richards: 46:07

other one, I'd say, is given that we all laughed about kumbaya at the start of this, before we started crying about Kumbaya. Don't be afraid to be a little bit off the wall with your retro format, even with a senior group, because sometimes going to a, let's call it maybe a humorous metaphor for your retro structure can make it safer to have a really tough discussion, right? Because, generally, you know, let's face it, if a retro is going to do something meaningful, you need to have an uncomfortable conversation, because you need to talk honestly about a real problem. And what makes it safe to have that discussion about a real problem. Facilitation is part of that. But like a retro I've used again and again and again, and I've actually used it, including C level executives. Is the James Bond retro, right? And the James Bond retro, you basically look at like, what are the questions you want to ask? And you pick James Bond films. So like, never say never again, or never say die. Never Say Die is a great one to go. You know, here's my prompt, what's something we used to do and we gave up on, and maybe we should have another crack at it. And so you design an entire retro by going, I've got questions I'd like people to explore, and I can use a James Bond film to trigger that particular bit of exploration, and it just provides that little you know, it's a very Niko thing to do, right? You jiggle people into a different space, and it's like, oh, we're in James Bond land. We can say something we wouldn't normally say. So don't be afraid to get a little bit out

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 47:33

there. Great. Your advice, your advances advices, sorry, your advanced advisors for young SPCs and RTS,

Ali Hajou: 47:42

advanced advice, if I may. I think there is, what taught me a lot, is to really sort of reverse engineer why their retrospective even exists. You know, agile manifesto talks about that that regular interfalls, you know, the team inspects whatever they're doing and then tune, tunes its behavior accordingly, I think, something like that. And the the team, therefore there, therefore the team needs to be able to reflect on something that they want to reflect on. So if you reflect on technology, the stuff that you've been building, that might actually be very, a very good starting point, actually an end point that you can use to reverse engineer from. So we would love to reflect about the technology that we build, because apparently my you know, the engineers, the people in your teams, like to talk about that. All right, then, how can I reverse engineer from there, how things went? What kind of design decisions have been made? Is there a moment to reflect on certain design decisions, maybe from a technical point of view, but also from a behavioral point of view, maybe even a little bit from a process point of view, I don't know. And I noticed that using the technique, it allows me, if I'm the facilitator, it allows me to to gather the right data that people also find very useful, and then have actually a very good discussion and a feedback session, which is, in a way, the retrospective, but we, yeah, we didn't call it like that, and it also didn't felt like, you know, the traditional retrospective. So I would, I would, if that would be my one advice to SPCs, you know, try that out. It's, it's free, it's easy. It makes you think a little bit, if you think, you know, with the end in mind, and then reverse engineer. It's, it helped me a lot. Yeah,

Stephan Neck: 49:52

and let me pick up Mark's passion again. Start with data. Start with quantitative stuff. Then. Into the qualitative feedback around that, get the different perspectives, a little bit of combiar. All good, right? But then followed by, and that's interesting, not many people are pretty strong. Me myself doing then the gap or indication analysis, we jump to conclusions too early, and conclusions should be proved, kind of underlaid by by this data or indication and, and, and a thorough assumption. How do we improve? Because the improvement item, or the action of item, again, is an assumption. Unless we have done it, we don't know. So

Mark Richards: 50:41

now that you've stolen data, I'm going to talk about something else. And sorry, Mike, sorry. That's all right, because, you know, sometimes I should get on a different hobby horse. But I think this is, this is probably the other piece for me, is when you think about retros, right? You walk into, let's say I walk into any organization that it's my first time walking around. I'm walking around, and I say how your retro is going. But generally it's pretty predictable. The answer will be some kind of groan, because it's not a lot of people will go, Oh, they're amazing. We're getting lots of value. And sometimes your job is to try and reinvigorate, oh, yeah, you know, actually, we do need to start trying to be systematic about improvement. I like to run the mentality of, like, an emotional bank account. I forget who it was. Many years ago I introduced this idea of an emotional bank account relationship, that there are times when you take an action the relationship that gives you a withdrawal, and there are times when you've taken an action in the relationship. That puts in a deposit. And if you want a good relationship, you better make sure that you're always living in credit, because it's much easier to take stuff out and put it in. And when I think about retros, I think about an energy bank account, right? I put people together for a retro I am spending energy, right? And particularly if it's an art level retro, because at that point I'm probably trying to pull senior people in, and so I'm asking them for energy, and the experience they have in the room will do a little bit of something about their instant feeling about whether it was worthwhile energy, but whether something changes later, we'll do a lot more. And so that question about what is my potential for action should really be guiding when you choose to spend energy, and if I use inspect and adapt as a really easy example, right? I've seen so many inspect and adapts where nobody has a plan for where the capacity and time is going to come from for the improvement actions at the end of the inspect and adapt, right? Because quite often they're pretty significant things, right? What's a big improvement actually we need to make? We need to clean up the provisioning of our test environments. Well, that's money, and you get a whole group of people in a room who say the biggest thing you could do to help us accelerate is, you know, resolve the issues we have, provisioning test environments, but you've got no commitment secured for somebody to go and fund the resolving of that and to prioritize the capacity of the people doing it. You've just made a huge withdrawal. You're in overdraft, and you're paying a lot of penalty interest. So a when you're framing a retro, think about, you know, what's the commitment you have from people who can authorize priority and money to do something with what comes out of it, and frame that into way you approach the retro? Don't hold it if you don't have any kind of commitment to doing something with the outcome. But the second thing, and this is why I get really focused about the data, on the change you make, right, is if you've got data to go, oh, actually, we did act on it. We fixed the provisioning of test environments, and that just saved us half a million dollars a year. That gives me energy back as well, because energy is not just energy to turn up. Energy is energy to provide you with the priority and the money to act on things. So approach your entire retrospective life based on building up your energy bank account.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 54:13

That's great. That's great. The energy energy account just triggered a different story. However, can tell my advice. I think it's important, if we're a young, young coach, young SPC, young RG, to think about, is it more a retro or is it more a problem solving workshop? Because it's a different energy level you play with it. So also different purpose you play with it. So for instance, if I have retros, I never ever ask again, what did wrong? Because one of my colleagues, I think is called aristotalis, from how long ago he told if you how he wrote, if you ask questions about the past, it's always about going to a corpse and open it and see what was wrong and doing finger pointing and find the one bond and over the body and its mouths. It's really not. A good feeling. So it's really about finding somebody to blame on. But if you ask questions about the future, it's always about values. So the question what went wrong or what could be improved is quite the same question, but it gives you a different mindset. And for retros, I never have questions going in the past, because I want to find solutions. I want to talk about values for problem solving workshops. You have to you have to go deeper, you have to find the root cause, and then you need the kind of skills with emotions, handle emotions, skills, what to do when people start blaming people. So it's not an easy format, and I think my advice is, as a young coach, SPC, what kind of retro or problem solving you're playing, and then be prepared to have the support you need and the skills you need, anything to add from your side. I'm just because otherwise the

Mark Richards: 55:54

beauty of diversity decay. Because for me, every retro is a problem solving session.

Ali Hajou: 56:02

For Niko, it's crime scene investigation,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 56:04

yes, yes, because I've seen so many crime scene investigations by Hopi hopey detectives that there was really, oh no, gosh, and now everybody is mad, angry, sad, and we achieved nothing. So you need some kind of skills to be able to do it. And Mark, I'm sure you can do it without sleep and half drunken, but other people don't have the skills, so please start small. Start with good respect of retros, and then yeah, for problem solving, you need the skills handle emotions, etc, but I don't want to stress too much out our time box. One key takeaway, if you have only one sentence about retros on art level. Which one would it be? Ali,

Ali Hajou: 56:47

release the strong grip on structure or on the book. Just find a way that works. You know, lose those what to keep, what to improve, kind of stuff. Wow, wow. Could be a

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 56:59

new religion. No. Stephan,

Stephan Neck: 57:02

yeah, let me. Let me throw in my kumbaya side. Anyway, history repeats itself, and history is done or made by people so sense. And listen to the periodicity of important issues in your social system, in your art, whoever is involved. Well, I

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 57:21

think I will pause this both. Both sentences were so, so deep. I think mine is just, oh gosh, mark your sentence. I get it while it's fresh. Oh, also, good advice for meat, yeah. So if I ever try to make a new sentence out of out of it is, is a if you do problem solving workshops, if your retro is problem solving, don't forget the problem space. It's not only the happy space, the solution space. Don't forget the problem space. To cool mark, bring us well, bring us Ali. We got

Mark Richards: 58:01

two elites, so that's right, we're not too bad on our time box management, but next week, we are on remote facilitation, and Ali will be hosting. And in actual fact, we already have one trigger question seated right when you're remote facilitator, what do you do if somebody starts crying

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 58:26

and it's not next week mark?

Mark Richards: 58:28

Oh, it is not next week. That is because we are all being slackers for various reasons. Will be the 22nd

Ali Hajou: 58:34

of professional slackers, right? I

Mark Richards: 58:37

know I'm having a barbecue. Ali is probably flying around the world, but we'll be back on the 22nd hope you've enjoyed this one. We've certainly enjoyed it. And we're going to hang up and we're going to do some kumbaya offline. Now. Enjoy

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 58:54

vacation, enjoy whether it's.