Email Linda Rising to get the power point of this talk linda@lindarising.org
Sunk cost effect - every six months they would evaluate project, say it wasn’t doing so well… but kept it going because they had already invested money in it Had been on a project that took 3 years and had cost the company 10 million dollars
Proect Retrospects - Norm Kerth Norm was a patterns guy, and a fan of learning and documenting thing
Is a project retrospective a post-mortem? Post mortems are only done after something dies.
The problem with post-mortems are that they are too late, it doesn’t benefit the person who has died.
The purpose of the retrospective is on learning, not causing blame Learn from the experience without worrying about who’s fault it was
How impossible the prime directive is.. google linda rising prime directive on infoq
In religion we have an affirmation of faith, sometimes we think we are not 100% sure we believe it. Agile is a faith in many ways…
Tuning an instrument is done often and often small adjustments. Retrospectives are about tuning as well
If we don’t do any science, it atleast behooves us to look at those that are, and then see what parallels we can bring back to us
See Rebecca Saxe on TED.com
Theory of mind, thinking about what others are thinking
Not just looking at the positive things… You have to balance the positive with the negative There is a lot of evidence from cognitive neural science that says the way we run our businesses and conferences is not good
Sitting is the worst position for anything. We sit too much
Research says we need to move
Most of us think that if we don’t sleep we will have so much time. If you don’t sleep enough we don’t learn Some companies have nap rooms
We put time pressures on retrospectives… come on, think, come up with something now
FlowCon - conference on continous stuff
What about continous retrospectives…
Build a timeline in realtime
Add ideas / experiments / what’s working / etc.
The only way to get around confirmation bias is to put yourself around people that don’t agree with you
How continous restrospectives work
Uncionscious mind is involved 24/7
Taking a break, sleeping on it
Walking
Listening to diverse others
Zigarnik Effect (Spelling) - once you have written something down, you can move on
We need to do them all
- Project retrospectives
- Iteration - tactical
- Continous - experiments
Resources
Thinking fast and slow - book Concrete Action Plan - book More fearless change - book Fearless Journey Game - buy the cards online
