10. Retros: The Most Important Meeting You Aren’t Having, With Jordan Husney
About this episode:
Original Air Date: January 27, 2020We all know that faster learning loops are critical to success in complexity. Yet, we rarely (if ever) take the time to practice one of the most powerful learning moves in the game: the retrospective.
In this episode, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans talk about the power of reflection—for the individual, team, and organization—and why we can't keep charging ahead without looking back. Later, they’re joined by Parabol founder and CEO Jordan Husney, who shares what he’s learned hosting tens of thousands of retrospectives on their platform, including this gem: ”The only wrong way to have a retrospective is to not have one at all.”
Tools from The Ready:
Mentioned in this episode:
Brave New Work, by Aaron Dignan
“Joel from Buffer”: BNW Ep. 6 with Joel Gascoigne
“Dan Kim”: BNW Ep. 4 with Dan Kim
In this episode:
Jordan Husney
CEO, Parabol
Jordan Husney is the founder and CEO of Parabol, an open-source meeting facilitation and asynchronous communication platform for agile teams. He founded the company in 2015 after previously working as a Director at Undercurrent, where he advised C-suite teams at Fortune 100 companies on the future of work. Parabol's initial product focused on executive status meetings before pivoting to serve agile development teams, starting with retrospectives.
Jordan's LinkedInJordan's TwitterParabol's Website
Aaron Dignan
Rodney Evans
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Jordan Husney:
You have to treat your work a little bit like a distance relationship, in the sense that if you don't make a date to get together again, the relationship's going to fall apart.
[Intro music]
Aaron Dignan:
Hey everybody, welcome to the show. This is Brave New Work, a podcast about reinventing our organizations, and the search for a more adaptive and human way of working. I'm Aaron Dignan and I'm joined by my co-host, Rodney Evans.
Rodney Evans:
Hello everyone.
Aaron Dignan:
On today's episode, we're going to discuss why we reflect infrequently, why we look back infrequently at work, and why we might want to do that more often. But before we do that, let's check in.
Rodney Evans:
Great. So we will start this episode like all the episodes with a check-in round question, and today's check-in question is, what is the best piece of advice you've ever been given, Aaron?
Aaron Dignan:
I think, at least professionally, I had a mentor that advised me to stop trying to change people and convince them of things, and just play with the people that wanted to play with me. And at that point in my career, I was really obsessed with what do I have to do to convince everyone to do this the way I want to do it, and to get every client that comes in the door to conform to that. And he was like, "No, don't do that. Just say no to all those people and just say yes to the people that want to do it the way you want to do it." And that opened up a whole new view for me.
Rodney Evans:
Awesome. For me, I had a business partner at a prior company who was very wise, and he had been on SEAL Team Six, and he had done a lot of things, and I always felt like had a really refreshing perspective. And I was going through some sort of existential work crisis, and he said to me, "Rodney, you only get one spin on this planet. What are you going to do with it?" And I've thought about that in so many moments of over-gripping or worrying about stuff that doesn't matter. And funnily, the way that he said it made me stop and think about it, because I'd never heard that exact phrase before, and I was like, "What does he mean?"
Aaron Dignan:
The one spin.
Rodney Evans:
What does the spin mean? Is that a day? Oh God. But then also it's just one of those things that's really stuck with me, I think because of who it came from, but also because what better advice is there?
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, it's true. It's true. It's the whole "this is not a dress rehearsal" thing. It seems like sometimes the things that get overdone in the advice world, and almost become trite, are definitely the deepest truths. It's like, "Oh yeah, that's a great t-shirt." And then when you actually come to the point in your life where you get it, you're like, "Oh, that's way more than a t-shirt."
Rodney Evans:
Right, exactly. Yeah, I feel like funnily, we both as people, who have probably gotten a lot of good advice in our lives, hung on to virtually the same trope, which is like, don't waste your life on dumb shit.
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Aaron Dignan:
Get to it. And with that in mind, let's-
Rodney Evans:
Let's get to it.
Why reflection matters more than we think
Aaron Dignan:
Let's not waste any more time getting into the topic. So this is a tension that we hear pretty commonly when we talk to teams, this idea that "we don't look back, we don't stop, we don't take stock, we don't make the time and the space to reflect, and think about what's working and what's not working." So I don't know, maybe talk a little bit about why and where you see that, and then what are the alternatives?
Rodney Evans:
What's interesting to me is I don't even hear a lot of people placing value on this practice. So when we do certain kinds of exercises and put certain tensions in front of teams, this is one that routinely comes up, because most people don't do it. And it's generally not one that people have a lot of energy around, because it's so far removed from the day-to-day, and from the way that they work together that they're like, "Why would you even?" So the thing I think is... We'll talk about why it's important and what it does for us. To me the headline of all of it is, if you want to be a learning organization, which we hear all the time, my question is, what is your learning practice? And without reflection, there is no learning, that's just true. And so I routinely want to understand from people who say that that's something that's really important to them, and that's the kind of culture that they want to have, where is the time and space, and practice, and habit, made for reflection and learning?
Aaron Dignan:
What is reflection, in an organizational context, in a team level?
Rodney Evans:
To me, team level reflection is any practice where as a group we get together and make sense of what has happened. So the practice that we most routinely use is retrospection, or using retrospectives. And to me that is the most direct and straightforward way of doing that pattern recognition and that sense making as a group. Maybe for the uninitiated, you want to just talk a little bit about retros and what that practice is.
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, as we were thinking about this topic, I kind of went back and thought, "Where did that even come from?" Because I think, in many ways, we've kind of fallen in love with the practice, with the idea of having a retrospective, but obviously, agile and scrum sprint retrospectives are not the be-all end-all for reflection. We have a few thousand years of wisdom and history behind that. So I just started digging around and there obviously were after action reports in military world that generals have been doing for centuries, if not millennia. There are debriefs in a lot of different industries where people take stock and look back. So I feel like it's a thing that we do plenty. And then certainly in philosophical and religious traditions, there's a lot of sit with what's happened. And even in therapy, diagnosing what has gone on.
So it feels like this very innately, intuitively human thing. And yet I think in the workplace in particular, we just don't make space for it. We don't make space for a fairly natural thing. And as a result it goes unused. And I do want to dig in in a second on why we don't make space for it. But to answer your question, I think the most common practice that we see now, that did sort of emerge out of the agile movement, was this idea of having a retrospective. Which is bringing a team or a cross-functional group of people together after something has launched, or a sprint has been completed, or a product has been put out in the world, or on a calendar basis, and asking the question, "What happened? And what went well and what didn't go well? And what did we notice? And what did we learn?"
And there are many different flavors of these retrospectives with different sections or prompts, but the basic idea is always the same. It's just what do we want more of and what do we want less of in the future, and what can we take away? And the act of conversing about that and coming to some agreement about what happened, and just noticing how other people experienced what happened, and what was good for them or bad for them, and the role that you might have played in that, or the situation might have played in that, is really powerful stuff. And in some ways, even if teams don't take any deliberate specific action coming out of that, there's just a shared consciousness, there's an awareness of what happened. So that retrospective practice is probably the one we're most committed to here at The Ready. But I think there are many other ways of reflecting and they're all pretty valuable.
What makes a retrospective actually work
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, totally. I think the thing about retros that I love, and I was late to the retro game, though I was very familiar with AARs from previous lives-
Aaron Dignan:
The after action report.
Rodney Evans:
The after action report indeed. Preceded by the after action review.
Aaron Dignan:
Correct.
Rodney Evans:
When I was in banking, we did postmortems a lot. I've experienced a lot of flavors of this. But I think what's powerful about the retrospective is the democratization of reflection, so the fact that everyone who participates is contributing equally, whether that's through post-it notes, or whether that's on a sort of virtual whiteboard. What I've found in a lot of other situations is the reflection follows the power dynamic that's already established. So someone is making sense of... For the collective, it's like someone is almost gathering data and being like, "What are we putting in the report?"
Aaron Dignan:
They're reviewing the collective.
Rodney Evans:
Right. They're going to ultimately write the bullet points that narrate the experience of the collective. Whereas in a retro, if I'm the power holder and I think a thing is super, super important and there's no other post-it notes about that thing on the retro board, we're probably not going to talk about it that much.
Aaron Dignan:
That's right.
Rodney Evans:
And it doesn't really matter that I'm the highest paid person in the room, because if nobody else cared, I can keep banging that drum.
Aaron Dignan:
There's no energy there.
Rodney Evans:
But there's no energy. We can talk about different kinds of practices, the value in a practice of reflection where there is equality of voice, I think is really important. Because you're not truly going to see patterns and recognize patterns, and understand divergence and convergence, unless you figure out a way to pull the politics out of the conversation.
Why teams resist doing retrospectives
Aaron Dignan:
That's right, yeah. And it kind of goes back to the principle of participation that we talk about in so many different contexts, which is we want more participation, we want more even participation, and through that, we hope to get the most accurate picture of reality. It's wisdom in the crowds all over again. So yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. So here's the question then. If these practices have been around forever, in different flavors, postmortem, AAR, debrief, retro, et cetera, and they're powerful, and I think we'd both agree that when we do them with our own team or with others, it's always like, "Why don't we do that more often?" Why don't we do that more often? What is your experience of the resistance to it and where does that come from?
Rodney Evans:
I don't know. I have so many answers, but also no answer. One thing pops for me, which is, in our deep human desire to tell our story and to tidily narrate, particularly things that have been unpleasant, and to box them up and make them feel safe for us again, often we don't want to swim in the stew of all of the angles of it and all of the perspectives that there might have been on that.
I've certainly had the conversation enough times to believe that this is a real thing, where I've said to a team, "Look, why don't we run a retro on this experiment we just did?" Or this project that just finished, or this launch that just failed, or whatever, and I get the response, "I think we know what happened." And it's like, "You don't." And all I hear in that is, "We don't want to talk about it." We don't want to take ourselves back to a place where we have to admire our own mistakes and failings, et cetera. And in our desire to control and avoid, we'd rather just not. We'd rather just not go back to it. Ironically, the more often you do it, the less unpleasant it is. But if you don't dive off the diving board, you're never going to start.
Aaron Dignan:
As I was reflecting on this, I was thinking... I was reflecting. I was thinking the thing we most want to avoid is that kind of emotional discomfort, and in order to do that, we're willing to deal with a lot of other kinds of discomfort. So like, "I would happily do the project again badly, with a bunch of people driving me crazy, if it means I don't have to tell Phil to his face that the way he handled this really was disruptive for me." And we deal with all the emotional "Sturm and Drang" that would come with that. I feel like we're very hesitant to go to those places.
And to your point, if you... And this is true in our relationships, with our families and our friends, and everybody else, our colleagues, if you don't go there, if you don't talk about what happened and make requests of each other, and make observations, and talk about your feelings and needs, then what builds up is quite a lot. So I can see how a team that had maybe not told each other the truth for a decade would be like, "We don't really want to debrief this project." Because it's not really the project they'd be debriefing, it would be the decade in review, it's like a referendum on the team. Whereas a team that's done this every two weeks for a year is like, "Oh, what haven't we heard? What haven't we already said?" So there is a little bit of a bandaid pulling that goes into this.
And that's why I think more than many practices that we coach and facilitate, I think this is one where the leaders, or the influencers, or the people that hold space in the organization, have to just commit to being like, "We're going to do this at the end of every project, or the end of every sprint, or the end of every month, for six months, no matter what. And then we'll talk about whether we ever want to do it again." Because you have to get over that hump of all the baggage and all the reasons not to do it, and the reasons to punt it. And that's the other thing we see a ton, is it's scheduled and that we're getting closer and closer, and then it's the day of and it's like, "Oh, well we have to reschedule." Because whoever can't be there, or there's some more important hot burning thing that goes on.
Which I guess at some level is probably the other number two reason why they don't happen. Which is we're so productivity-obsessed as a culture, and as a result, the idea that just sitting around and talking about what happened, and learning, doesn't feel very productive. And what would feel a whole lot more productive is just rock it right into the next project, or meeting, or whatever, and do it badly again. That would be much preferred, in terms of just putting points on the board, than everybody's sitting in a room and being like, "So what did you notice in the last two weeks?"
Rodney Evans:
Right. So one thing, just to go back to the safety of it, that's worth mentioning is with a lot of teams I've worked with, I have noticed that when they start this practice, the items that they bring, or the stickies that they write, are pretty surface in nature, and as a facilitator, I'll be like, "Three per person. I said three." Because people are just like, "I don't want it. I'm going to keep it in my head. I'm not going to play. I'm going to see what else ends up there." You know what I mean? But with most teams that create any kind of habit... And I had this happen with a team last year, and it was one of the most mind-blowing situations. It only took them, I would say, three months of monthly reps, before their sticky notes were like, "You know what, Mike? Here's the thing we need to talk about."
And it was so great because they so quickly realized that there wasn't going to be a repercussion. Afterward they weren't going to walk out and knife each other in the hallway. And in fact, when they did that stuff in the room, they did make a lot of sense out of what happened. Mike did apologize, because he didn't even realize that there was an ax grind, et cetera, et cetera. You can really think of it like waiving into the deep end of the pool. It's not like the first day or the first rep has to be this soul-bearing thing.
Aaron Dignan:
The most exposed.
Rodney Evans:
Teams learn how to do that over time. But I think the idea that that's even where our head is, is scary.
Aaron Dignan:
And the space that's created by saying, "We do this thing in this way." And then doing it over and over again, it... We're so ritualistic as humans, we change our mindset and our perceptions, and the way we show up depending on what we're doing, and it is a little bit like the surgeon washing their hands before surgery. You go into the room and it's like, "Now we're going to have a retro." And somehow that is a safer space. It's a different thing than just confronting Mike in the hallway and being like, "Mike, you suck." But in the retro, we all know this container and we know what it's for, and somehow doing that there, there's just more space for it.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, absolutely. And to your other point about it not feeling like the most pressing thing we have to do, I still feel very challenged by that. So I was recently on a project with a very beloved colleague, and we decided, because of the pace of how things were going, that once a week we were going to do a mini retro, which we call the hotwash, which is also from the military, and we are going to take 30 minutes and just do-
Aaron Dignan:
A hotwash.
Rodney Evans:
A hotwash. What went well, what didn't go well, what does that mean for next week? And there was something about it that to me felt like I was skipping school. I don't know if it felt selfish, or it felt fun, or it felt indulgent. I don't know what the quality of the guilt was, but every single week there would be a part of me that would be like, "We should be working on something." Quote, unquote, "As if this isn't work." And yet, I both know intuitively and from doing that practice in that engagement, that it's probably the most valuable 45 minutes of the week, and yet every week I was like, "Should we? Or should we-"
Aaron Dignan:
You can't shake it.
Rodney Evans:
I don't know what is in there for me, but it's deep and somatic, that I'm like, "This is screwing around, not working."
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah. And in some ways I think that reflects back to our broader practice of organizational change, because the retro is the first step in noticing a tension, or an opportunity, or something to do differently, and the next step would be to put a new practice in place, or a new commitment, or a new agreement. In some ways, that's why I think a lot of organizations struggle with continuous change, period. Because they're just like, "Working on how we work, just doesn't feel like the work." It's not the same thing as shipping new code, or shipping a document, or a new product or something, that where you feel like, "Man, I'm working on the thing."
Rodney Evans:
On the thing.
Aaron Dignan:
Instead, you're working on the way the system works. We're working in the business and on the business. And I do feel like there's a real cultural perception about that, that's just often that we all have to grapple with.
Where retrospectives go off the rails
Aaron Dignan:
So I guess what I'm wondering from here is, are there questions that you're sitting with, having spent so much of your career in reflection with teams, et cetera? What are you still wondering about when it comes to retrospectives and reflection as a practice? What are you still curious about or feel like is more unknown?
Rodney Evans:
A few things. One is I still wonder about the size of the containers. So I find with teams that haven't done as much working on how they work, that I tend to make the containers smaller, so tighter questions, more specifically like, "I want this many ideas per question." More rigor and constraint around them, because I think that makes them feel safe, like a ThunderShirt for a dog. And then over time, making that more expansive. But I even find for myself sometimes the constraint creates a really different insight. When I constrain myself to like, Ali and I this week are only going to talk about how we partnered. And next week we're only going to talk about the asset that we created. And next... There's utility in that, and in-
Aaron Dignan:
In the focus.
Rodney Evans:
In how constrained you are in the questioning, in the time boxing, in the processing. This pertains to retros, but it also pertains to journaling, or any other kind of reflective activity that you're doing, and I just wonder what's the right size of that.
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Rodney Evans:
What about you?
Aaron Dignan:
I think same. I think a lot about the frequency and the team size. So again, it comes down to the fine-tuning, but what are the right frequencies for different sorts of teams, and how many people need to be involved for it to be helpful or beneficial? And you can keep expanding that aperture. Do you it with just the two of you? Do you do it with you two and your client? Do you do it with the client and their customers? There's so many different ways to slice and dice that. And I think as you get more comfortable with the practice and you realize how many different levers there are in the control room, which ones do you use when and why? And I don't know, there's a lot of theory out there about that. When to zoom in, when to zoom out. When to have more, when to have less. When to do it fast, when to really make it expansive.
I think a lot of that we're just feeling into right now. And I would love to build maybe some more heuristics, or some more standards, that of course you can diverge from, but they just say, "Here's a really good way to think about retros within a team over the course of a year." And how many you might have and what some basic rules of the road might be. You know, we always joke that the best retro is the one that happens, because there's always a lot of debate about, "How do we make it perfect?" And at some level, because the bar is so low, because we do it so rarely, the right answer is just do one. Just get in the room and just talk to each other. I think that's right. And then I think the questions I'm sitting with are, if you can get past that hump, and I would argue that even we are not always past that hump. We punt our retros from time to time.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. No, never happens.
Aaron Dignan:
I think once you can get past that hump, then the next question becomes how then do you further design and manufacture the right experiences?
Rodney Evans:
I think that's right. And the other thing that makes me think about is just, how do we collectively realize when we're in our anxiety brain? If you have had a lot of therapy, or practice Buddhism, or participate in a variety of these kinds of disciplines, there's a lot of conjecture that depression lives in the past and anxiety lives in the future. And if you have an anxiety brain, you tend to spend a lot of time planning and considering what might be. And certainly in most companies, there is a tremendous amount of systemic anxiety, and so all of the investment that feels worthy is, "Let's look forward. Let's just...forward."
And so I also was thinking as you said that, about the routinization is so important. And then also how do we just start to tell our anxiety brain that pausing, though counterintuitive, actually is the solve? Sitting and doing another planning session will not take care of the anxiety that you're feeling about the unknown. And it's no different than your therapist saying, "Sit down and journal or meditate." And you being like, "How does that solve my problems?" It's the same thing, it's just at a system level.
Aaron Dignan:
Right. Yeah, you have to point that anxiety somewhere, and I think... Most recently I've been harvesting, we have a little garden in the back and I've been harvesting, and I often use the garden metaphor or analogy about this work. And we are noticing what worked this year and what didn't, and I'm looking at my wife and I'm like, "If we don't write down that this vegetable didn't grow well here, we will plant this shit again next year and forget." And then we're going to be back here again, being like, "The tomatoes didn't really pop, did they?" And they're not going to. But the practice of...
And so even though I have anxiety about next year, the right move is not to rush to replant. That's the exact wrong move. The right move is really study what happened and then make different choices. So I think you just have to... With so many things in our work, it's about redirecting the energy, not saying no to it. Have your anxiety, that's fine. Where are you channeling it to though? How do you channel it in a healthy way? And I think the retrospective practice, the reflection practice, at an individual level, at a team level, at an org level, at a market level, is really, really good hygiene. So I think that's where we should leave it. And at this point, I think we should turn our thoughts to who can come shed even more light on this.
Rodney Evans:
The person I'm most excited to talk to about retrospectives is our friend and co-conspirator, Jordan Husney, who has created a technology called Parabol that supports this kind of work. So after the break, we will be joined by Jordan.
Aaron Dignan:
Ready, set, go.
[Music interlude]
Jordan Husney on the origins of Parabol
Aaron Dignan:
Hey everybody, we're back with Jordan Husney, co-founder and CEO of Parabol. Jordan, welcome to the show.
Jordan Husney:
Thanks for having me, Aaron. Hi Rodney.
Rodney Evans:
Hey.
Aaron Dignan:
Jordan. For those that don't know, what is Parabol and why did you build it?
Jordan Husney:
Parabol is a free place on the internet to hold a great retrospective or status meeting. It's particularly suited for agile teams or project teams that have just completed something hard. We built Parabol because I noticed when I was a consultant working with you, that folks were already working remote back in 2013, 2014. They would sit in traffic for a couple of hours, and then show up and have a full day of video conference meetings. And I had this prediction that conference rooms were quickly going to become irrelevant and it was all going to move online, and it looks like that was a good prediction.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. I would say that is definitely coming true more and more every year. One thing that I've wondered about, and I don't know this story, Jordan, is why retros versus another way of working, or another meeting type? Did you guys think about anything else, or was it always retros, and why?
Jordan Husney:
Yeah, so it's a startup story in the sense that where the market has a start and where we wanted to start were two different places. We wanted to be able to facilitate a new way of working in a digital way for everybody, and that meant making it easier to have effective meetings. What we found was that the community of folks who are ready for that today, practice agile. And they are the folks that already are used to having structured meetings, working in a cadence, they want to go to a place to meet online. And increasingly, agile product development teams specifically, can't hold them in conference rooms, because they're already working with folks that are living in a multitude of time zones and geographies. So agile and retros was the place to start.
What thousands of retros taught Jordan
Aaron Dignan:
That makes perfect sense. So you are probably one of a handful of tools online then that are seeing dozens, if not hundreds, of retros flow through your system on a regular basis. What have you learned about retrospectives, watching people use the tool and struggle with the tool? What are some of the takeaways about this practice that you've been able to observe, as a host for so many of them?
Jordan Husney:
So yeah, we've seen roughly 55,000 meetings now be run on the platform.
Rodney Evans:
Wow. Damn.
Aaron Dignan:
Wow.
Jordan Husney:
Yeah, it's wild. There are 700 organizations that are active on the tool, out of many thousand who have showed up to run retros. If a team shows up and invites their friends, and then they grow to, let's say, three teams or more, there's a pretty good chance that one of us is going to reach out to try and learn more about that organization. We really try to learn about our users firsthand. What we've learned is that teams that would self-assess as being in crisis, like, "The sky's on fire and we're barely going to make it," those are the ones who will probably not run retrospectives regularly.
Rodney Evans:
Totally, that tracks.
Jordan Husney:
Yeah. And the ones who already have their shit together, they're going to stick. And that is real interesting to me.
Rodney Evans:
So for the teams, Jordan, that are a little avoidant about doing retros, because of crisis, or whatever the reason, why? Why do you think people hesitate to do this practice?
Jordan Husney:
I think that the surface reason is that they are always looking forward. They can only see the mountain of work. They've already missed the deadline in their mind. They're just perpetually missing deadlines that they're creating for themselves, or that the world has for them. And as such, their level of anxiety is so high that taking a pause, or what feels to them like taking a pause, and working on the team itself feels like an indulgence, and that they don't deserve the indulgence. Broadly generalizing, that's what we see there.
Aaron Dignan:
I think even we've experienced that. It does feel like you're not doing, and I'm making air quotes with my fingers right now, "the work", when you're doing a retrospective. It feels like you're taking a vacation from the work to communicate and then somehow that that's not going to feed back into a sharper ax, a more efficient approach, a more effective team, which of course it does. And every time we finish one we're like, "Ugh, we're so glad we did that." And every time we start one we're like, "Do we really need this? Why are we doing this?"
Jordan Husney:
That's right. What's funny is when I speak with those teams, or one of my colleagues speaks with those teams, they always say the same thing. So, team in crisis, hair on fire, they're like, "Well, how was that retro?" They're like, "Oh my goodness, it was so good. Oh, we worked on so many things." And we'll say, "Well, are you going to do it again?" "Yeah, if we can possibly make the time. Things are really crazy for us right now." And what we try to leave behind with them is you have to treat your work a little bit like a distance relationship, in the sense that if you don't make a date to get together again, the relationship's going to fall apart.
Aaron Dignan:
It's not going to happen.
Jordan Husney:
Yeah. We, obviously not in a scientific way, have tracked a team that self-reports that they're in crisis with adopting the habit of retros, but I'm a little skeptical that folks that are already there are able to turn it around. What we do see is many thousands of teams who aren't in crisis and they approach the ends of their work in a very passionate way, but they're actually very dispassionate about working together. In the sense that they see it almost like what I imagine an amazing military unit to be, they're just head in the game doing the job, bullets might be flying, but it's steady on.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. And I love what you said about the time commitment, because it is so often an excuse. And one of my resolutions for this year, which is not really a resolution because I hate them, but I am getting really serious about just scheduling the things that are important. Because we travel and we have busy lives, and it's very easy to let things go. And I got my hair cut on Friday and the woman who cuts my hair was like, "Bitch, when was the last time you got your hair cut?" And I was like, "I don't know, like 11 months ago."
Aaron Dignan:
A long time ago.
Rodney Evans:
And she was like, "You are an adult human being. You need to get your hair more than once a year." Which is true, true story, Kales, I see you. And when I was walking out of the hair salon, I just made an appointment for 12 weeks from now. And the likelihood is approximately 80% better that that will happen than that I would remember to call in 12 weeks and make an appointment, because by then it's over and the flights are booked, and it's never going to happen. And even though it's a small and silly example, I feel like it's the same thing with retros. It's not on the calendar and we don't at least try to schedule our lives around it. The likelihood of getting those people together through kismet or luck is quite low.
Jordan Husney:
Yeah, I think that that's exactly right. We're recording this right now, shortly after the holidays, the new year has just passed, and we all know that gyms everywhere are overfull, right?
Rodney Evans:
Right, are exploding.
Aaron Dignan:
Are flooding.
Jordan Husney:
And I think that if any one of us approaches a team that is super busy, that thinks that they're in crisis, and we ask them to adopt one more thing, the chances of that thing being adopted is really low. But at the beginning of a cycle, the beginning of a new year, it's pretty easy to get your butt to the gym, the same thing... And this is a very practical tip for anyone who's retro-curious, a really great way to run a retro, actually run a pre-mortem before the project kicks off.
So what you do is you go to Parabol.co, you create a new meeting, and then you gather your folks together, and you just ask a couple of easy questions. The first is, what are the best possible things that could come out of this project if we do a stellar job? And then what should we watch out for? What's the worst possible things that are going to happen when we're done with this project? What are we going to be sad about? And then you can mitigate those things, and then you'll find that it's easy to pick up the retro habit, because pre-mortems are super effective.
Aaron Dignan:
That makes sense. And they're fun. I think it's a lot more fun to imagine how things might go terribly wrong-
Jordan Husney:
That's right.
Should retrospective feedback be anonymous?
Aaron Dignan:
Than it is to actually have them go terribly wrong and then talk about it. So yeah, it's a form of scenario planning. So what are some of the things that are controversial within a retro? What will people talk about? What will they not talk about? What's hard about it? What are some of those habits? What have you noticed about the meat within the retro itself?
Jordan Husney:
Well, as far as holding retros in numbers and getting feedback on a retrospective product, the most controversial thing that we see is whether or not feedback given in a retro should be anonymous or not. And it divides 50-50. It's Coke or Pepsi on that question.
Aaron Dignan:
Wow.
Jordan Husney:
And that I find fascinating. As far as I can tell, and I'm using some intuition here when I talk to team leads, it depends on the degree of safety within the team. Where if there's a high degree of safety, people don't necessarily want the feedback to be anonymous, because they're like, "People should be able to say whatever they say, if we know who said it ahead of time, it's going to save us time because we can turn right to that individual and we can say, 'Jane, tell us what you meant by that comment. Can you give us an example?'" And then there's a lot of folks that believe that it should be anonymous because it's a forum by which people can say what they're seeing, and check if anyone else is going to validate it.
Aaron Dignan:
What's so funny about this Jordan, is that we just had Joel from Buffer on the show talking about transparency, and they specifically played with making their feedback process transparent and they changed it back.
Jordan Husney:
Oh.
Aaron Dignan:
Because it was one place where they were like, "Ugh, the juice for the squeeze is not necessarily worth it there. And it's better to let people decide if they want to go public with their feedback so that they can get help and support." And what my immediate reaction was, and I want to hear from each of you where your head went on this Coke or Pepsi choice is, I think feedback about specific interactions, or general phenomenon within the team and the project, I'd be totally open to I think hyper personal, hyper vulnerable feedback. Maybe not, just because there's such an audience there and it also might feel a little indulgent on that one-to-one relationship, to have the other ten of us standing there while you work that out. So I came down on the some but not all side of the fence, but I'm curious what you think Jordan, and what you think Rodney.
Rodney Evans:
I just want to clarify for people who maybe haven't done retrospectives before, or maybe are not familiar with Parabol, what we're talking about is as we are generating sticky notes, whether they're virtual or whether they're paper, having some kind of identifier. So in the most classic retros, we're all sticking stuff up there. And if we're using post-it notes versus a platform, there are generally tells, because the human beings are walking their stickies up to the board, we recognize each other's handwriting. And so even though we're not labeling things with our name, after a couple of reps, you start to know pretty clearly whose is what. In a platform like Parabol, there is more of a mask, because things are just appearing on a screen with no other identifiers.
But either way, in either instance, and anonymous or not anonymous, as the conversation unfolds, inevitably it's like, "I want to know more about this sticky." And then I wrote it and so then I have to say something. Or it's silent when someone asks that question and it's super fucking awkward, which I've seen many times. So I just wanted to clarify the operational aspect of that, in case anybody didn't have a mental model of what we were talking about.
Aaron Dignan:
Who wrote this "Rodney sucks" post-it?
Jordan Husney:
Yeah.
Aaron Dignan:
And dead silence.
Rodney Evans:
No one. No one's ever written that post-it. Just so everyone who is listening knows.
Aaron Dignan:
It's clear.
Jordan Husney:
On the teams that you work with, Rodney, do you have an instinct as to which direction you'd lean and why?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I lean strongly toward anonymity, even though I understand that for the reasons I just said, that's not legit always, because of the ways in which you can identify if you're in the room together. And even having used Parabol many times, I know how other people write and what sort of their pet gripes are, and I have a pretty good idea of who's written a lot of stuff anyway, even when it is anonymous. My reason for anonymity is actually a little bit... It's related to safety, but it's a little bit less about the vulnerability and it's more about the power dynamic.
And the thing that I love about this kind of structure is that it is emergent and that it is equal, equal contribution. If I am the lowest paid person on the team, but I want to make 20 sticky notes, and Jordan, you're the highest paid person, you only want to make two, we can do that. And there's not rules that say that... There's voice that's related to hierarchy. And I just think when you make things non-anonymous, just because of human nature and pack order, and our basest instincts, we start to look around to be like, "What is the boss saying and what are his topics? And where is that energy going?" And even though we know some of that is going to show up anyway, I like the idea of hedging that to whatever extent possible.
Aaron Dignan:
Kind of blunting that, yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. What do you think, Jordan? Where do you land on this one?
Jordan Husney:
I land on the anonymity side of this argument as well. And yeah, I think that the power structure thing is vital. The second factor that sways me is about anchoring, which is you... When you're sitting down to do a retro, and if you're just asking two simple questions, which is like, "Where did we do well? Where could we do better?" You want to get as broad a diversity of examples in both of those columns as possible. And if you're able to see what I'm writing when I'm writing it, it's just going to bias your mind down a certain track. Now that said, I actually think in a very practical way that it's not Coke or Pepsi, it might be Dr. Pepper. It's a little bit of both, where you might want to do a pass where you get a bunch of diversity out on the table, and then you do a second round, and maybe you do some light grouping.
Aaron Dignan:
A reveal.
Jordan Husney:
Yeah. And then you say, "Hey, let's go a little bit deeper." I think where teams... An effective retrospective versus one that's less effective, because of course we know the only wrong way to do a retrospective is not to do one in the first place, but the most effective retrospective that you can have I think is not abstract. It is as micro-detailed and anecdotal as possible. And so in your second pass after you got everyone's feedback up on the wall, then you just do the thing where it's like, "Great, can we give more examples of this theme or that theme?" And you kind of mine those things out a little bit.
Rodney Evans:
And just to totally plus one that, Jordan. As a facilitator in the room, more than once in my life have I seen what emerged in the first round, only had a plan for the first round, and been like, "Okay, we didn't really get there." And been like, "Okay, everybody grab another post-it deck." And then thought for a minute about a deeper question set that I could ask to get to the level of granularity or specificity that you're talking about. So I feel like whether you're in the room or in a tool, if you're doing this for the first time and in the first round of data you don't get what you're looking for, don't hesitate to just take another crack at it. Because in emergent practice that's what happens. Sometimes you don't get the content after.
Jordan Husney:
That's right.
How culture shapes the way teams give feedback
Aaron Dignan:
You're peeling the onion. And if it's been a long time, it's a pretty tough outer layer. You really have to do a few rounds. So I hear us talking about anonymity and power, and now I'm starting to think also about culture and geography. So is there an element of that in here as well, Jordan, either about cultures that are drawn to the retrospective practice or cultures that show up to it differently?
Jordan Husney:
Oh, thank you for asking that question. Yeah, we've seen something really funny that makes sense in the posterior, but surprised us at first. We're a US-based company. Most of the tech we built here in the West Coast, but over a third of our users are in Germany and the Netherlands. And at first you can kind of chuckle it and you're like, "All right, we get it. Agile is popular in Germany, because Germans love process." But in fact it's a little bit deeper than that. I've noticed an anecdotal bias in the US for harsh feedback...not harsh, let's call it honest, honest feedback to be delivered one-on-one. Save it for the one-on-one, we'll talk behind closed doors. Germans seem to have much less of that bias, and so they can chew through more organizational tension in a group setting, and therefore be more efficient with their time. And they tend to do that in a retrospective, and that's been really cool for us to see.
Aaron Dignan:
That's interesting. And I know on a previous moment, Rodney, you mentioned working with a Dutch bank, to have a similar experience.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Aaron Dignan:
That sort of willingness to go there.
Rodney Evans:
Right. And I just was in a little coaching cohort and I coached a German executive, and I have this experience a lot as a coach, where someone will be telling you about an issue that they have that's interpersonal, and as a coach you're like, "Well, what conversations have you had?" And most of the American clients are like, "Well, I haven't, at all." And I coach this woman every night for a week, and in every single session, no exaggeration, there would be a moment where I'd be like, "Have you talked to this person?" And she was like, "Of course." "Obviously." She was like, "Yeah, dumb ass. Of course I talked to them." That's not how we do it where I live, we talk to people about the things that are bothering us. But it was just so telling that there was not one moment where she was like, "Maybe I should have that conversation." Because it's so obvious that if you are holding tension in those cultures, you would address it.
Turning retrospective insights into real action
Jordan Husney:
We ask every team that we talk to to give us examples of the change that they make. And we have noticed something, and this is going to be a question for you both, in a culture in the Netherlands, or in Germany, or if you're working at a great place in the US, it's pretty easy to make individual change. If you can surface the anecdote like, "Yes, I was the one that shipped the change out to production and I broke our application for everyone. Next time what I'm going to do is I'm going to change my behavior in this way." That's pretty easy to do, because that's all within your scope and power as an individual to change yourself. Where everyone seems to get stuck is when you have to change something as a group and retro surface that tension, but if you're just getting started, how would you recommend that they process it?
Aaron Dignan:
I think the retros are in many ways part of that first moment in our looping process. And we talk about looping from tension to practice, to experiment, in the book, that's exactly what we're getting at. And sometimes to find the tension, we have to talk to each other. So it might be obvious to me, but it's not obvious to you. And so the retro is one of those kinds of moments where you can say, "What's holding us back from doing our best work?" And this anecdote, or this moment, or this thing that happens comes up. And then the next thing we can do then, coming out of that retrospective space and into a more proactive space is be like, "Okay, well what should we try instead?" And if it is a group phenomenon, what should we try instead might be a new working agreement, it might be a new process, it might be a new set of roles, it might be a change in decision rights. There's a whole wealth of OS change that comes on the heels of that.
But depending on what it is, it could be quite simple, or it could be quite elaborate. The important thing I think is to delineate between the retrospective space, where we're mining for tension and understanding, and then this more OS design and change space where we're saying, "Yeah, let's go try something new in the future." And one of the things I like about the tool, honestly, no shameless plug, is that it has the space on the right for action and for insight. And so you have your things you're talking about, the cards and quote, unquote, "post-its", that you've played with in the first round of coming up with stuff to observe. But then to the right, it's like, "All right, well, what are we going to do about it?" Which is the part that I think people often miss in the retrospective, is they get really excited about the sharing, and then there isn't a lot of meat on the bone about what happens next week or next month.
Jordan Husney:
Yeah. I think that... So I'll raise an anecdote from a really cool company. Are you both familiar with DuckDuckGo?
Rodney Evans:
No.
Aaron Dignan:
Oh yes.
Jordan Husney:
So DuckDuckGo is... They're these crazy idealists who are trying to compete with Google. They've started a search engine company.
Aaron Dignan:
In search.
Jordan Husney:
Yeah. And their thing is, it's all about privacy, so it's the Google that you would use if you don't want everything that you search for to be tracked. And they're a fully distributed company, they have no central office. And when they run retrospectives and they surface organizational tension, they do a thing that I wish more organizations would do, where every working agreement, whether or not it's organizational, like, "This is our company's vacation policy," or if it's role specific, like "Who gets to ship code or not ship code," that working agreement has a single owner. And the tensions and anecdotes that come up get pinned to that working agreement. So you can see these tree rings of tension with their working agreements as time goes on.
And the individual who owns that working agreement gets to be the person who's like... The working ingredients by product. Now let's convene a process to iterate it. And it's up to that individual to decide if they want to do that by consensus or consent, or a vote, or however. And I think that's pretty cool. That's the place that I see today where organizations really get stuck. It's like, "Okay, well now we see the tension, but how do we actually turn it into some change?"
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And what we haven't talked about but is probably worth mentioning is, in my view at least, a retro is one aspect of a disciplined operating rhythm. And the other aspects that are very important are things like weekly action or tactical meetings, are things like governance meetings, are things like strategy meetings. And when you get really dialed in at doing these practices, you'll notice, we notice a couple of things with teams. One is that if you're missing parts of that operating rhythm, then the meeting that you have will start to dysfunction. So the retro will start to become a planning meeting because we don't have a strategy meeting, or the action meeting will start to become the place where we need to talk about what happened because we don't have a retrospective meeting.
Jordan Husney:
That's right.
Rodney Evans:
That's just what happens because we don't have all the containers. Well, I really like to see... I think I would say the retro is the most important part of an operating rhythm, and if you are a team that has those other kinds of forums happening, it becomes really easy, through the course of a retro, to just be like, "Okay, that's a project that's going to go in the backlog. Okay, that's a proposal that someone will draft for the next governance meeting. Okay, that's a thing for us to slot into our triage list to unblock next week." If we have the other places, then it's really easy for the tensions, and ideas, and solutions that get surfaced in a retro to be pushed to the next place.
Jordan Husney:
That's right. That makes a lot of sense to me. When we've thought about the hierarchy of needs of meetings, because in the end we have... our most popular meeting is the retrospective meeting, but we are an online meeting company, so having a sense of the order of where to go is important. Retros to us also feel like, and we have the data to show, that it's where teams like to start. I think then there's an open question, is the next place that you go fixing your planning process? Or is the next place that you go fixing your weekly status action or tactical meeting? And controversy, I think it's actually the planning meeting where you go next, because if you don't feel like you have a prioritized list of things to do, then it becomes really hard to feel like your status meeting isn't the place to do your planning, to your point, Rodney,
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I could totally make the argument either way. I would probably go to the weekly instead of a planning meeting, not because I don't think that they're both necessarily, but only because I see too many teams who go into a planning meeting but don't yet understand what their shared work really is.
Jordan Husney:
Oh, yeah.
Rodney Evans:
And so I want them to be in a feedback loop between something that looks like a weekly review of like a kanban board, and a planning meeting to be like, "Okay, well, what is our shared work that we're currently doing and don't know what another is doing? Okay, now let's have a conversation about something that is higher order, that governs whether that is the right work to be doing, and then let's go back to the weekly and clean that shit up." But I totally get your rationale, Jordan. I just do find the thing where teams go like, "Oh, we're a team because we report to the same person." But they don't yet have that understanding, even after a retro, of what their shared work is and why they exist as a group.
Aaron Dignan:
It occurs to me that this is a complex phenomenon, because-
Rodney Evans:
Do you think, Aaron?
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, of course, right. Because it's not complicated, it's not a watch, right? It's going to be some teams need to go to this meeting and some teams need to go to that meeting.
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Aaron Dignan:
I think we can all agree on that. The other voice I'm hearing in my head is our previous guest, Dan Kim, being like, "Don't pre-schedule all these meetings."
Rodney Evans:
Correct.
Aaron Dignan:
So there is a little bit of a paradox here, of what do you need as a team? Do you need the retro on the board every four weeks no matter what? And that's something that supports where you're at as a team. Are you at a level of day-to-day honesty and fluidity that you can schedule it when you need it? I think you have to check in with yourself and your team to know. I don't know that there is a silver bullet here. But I think the good news is that there's only a handful of moves. And one move is do a retro, and you can do it regularly or you can do it ad hoc, but if it never happens, you're not doing either one. And so you have to decide.
Jordan Husney:
The wonderful thing about retros is that everyone can do them. Every kind of team can do them. You don't have to be an agile team. You don't have to share tasks. You actually don't even have to be dependent on each other. Even if you're just a working group and you all do sort of the same thing, like if you're all accountants, or you're all lawyers, you don't even share the same account, you can come to a retro, reflect on what went well, what went poorly, within a timeframe, and have a bunch of epiphanies about how to improve your own individual practice. And not every gathering of people can be that productive and that universal.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. And I'm really glad you said the thing, Jordan, because I didn't think to, about starting with a retro. Because to your point, I think whether you're a pretty loosely knit group, or not even really a group, or you're a team that's coming together for the first time under a new leader, or around a new project, no matter how much shared context and shared content you have, I think it is fascinating to see how doing this practice will pull a group together and create some kind of coalescing, just by understanding what our shared experience has been, and starting to see those patterns. And I've really started using retros in the last six months as a significant tool for psych safety, for that reason. Before we even get into a user manual to me, or figuring out what our team charter is or whatever, I just think it's really interesting to bring a group of human beings who maybe don't even know each other's last names together, and be like, "How's life been for you?" Let's see. Let's see what exists that we share.
Jordan Husney:
Yeah. Actually, it'd be fun to think about what that question set would be, for your retro.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Jordan Husney:
You kind of let your team coalescing pre-mortem.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, your introductory retro.
Jordan Husney:
Yeah, that would be really cool.
Pro tips for running a better retrospective
Rodney Evans:
So speaking of, as we bring this super fun convo to a close Jordan, what are some of the pro-tips that you have, both for the teams who are doing their very first retro, who have never even thought about this practice until they listened to this podcast, and then at the other end of the spectrum, what are a couple of pro-tips for the people who are varsity, dialed in, but want to be even better?
Jordan Husney:
All right. Well the first is about attitude. Check in with yourself and ask yourself when you're working with your team if you have big launch mentality or not. What I mean by that is are you viewing your work as rowing the oar and keeping pace with your colleagues to get someplace gradually? Or are you thinking about this in terms of scaling a mountain and you're eventually going to reach a pinnacle?
I would argue that you should have the oar rowing mentality. And the more you can psych yourself out of the big launch, if we just get this thing over the line, "everything's going to be awesome mindset", the more fulfilling your work's going to be, the better your work is going to be, and the better performing your team is going to be as a result.
The way that I say it to my own team is it's just about painting the fence. That will keep you in the right frame of mind to hold your team rituals and hold regular retrospectives, and think about making small, rapid team improvements. And having little phrases, like paint the fence, keeps them in the pocket, of how they should be thinking.
Second pro-tip is be as anecdotal as possible, and if you find... A terrible retro is a bunch of people giving feedback like, "We did good work." "Too many bugs."
Aaron Dignan:
Nailed it.
Jordan Husney:
Shipped late. Right?
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Jordan Husney:
That's terrible feedback, but it's extremely common. Great feedback sounds like, "Requiring three people to sign off on every code review held us back from making our ship window this sprint." That's a really great piece of feedback to write down. And putting in that level of detail into your retrospective is the right thing to do. And then for your varsity team, I think that a great retrospective practice is to... I'll give you a couple. One is rotate the facilitator around because-
Rodney Evans:
Cool, yeah.
Jordan Husney:
That changes the emotional environment and the type of feedback that you get a lot.
Aaron Dignan:
Power dynamics.
Jordan Husney:
Hashtag power dynamics. The second is when you get to the change making part of your retro, where you've discovered some theme, it's hot for a number of people, you hold the discussion. Echoing back to what I was saying about being anecdotal, the most powerful question you can ask is, "Can you give me an example?" And then the second most powerful question that you can ask is, "Well, what should we do next time?" And assigning change as work. You don't have to come up with a proposal for what to do within the retro. As a matter of fact, it's probably best if you don't. But coming up with a work item that sounds like "a revised vacation policy", or "new code review policy drafted", and handing it to a single owner, for them to be accountable, is powerful stuff.
Rodney Evans:
Awesome.
Aaron Dignan:
All right, well I think that probably draws our little retrospective on retrospectives to a close. So Jordan, thank you so much for joining us today.
Jordan Husney:
Thanks for having me, folks.
Aaron Dignan:
And Rodney, thank you as always.
Rodney Evans:
Happy to be here.
Aaron Dignan:
Quick tip of the hat to Taylor Marvin for making us sound good in the booth. Brave New Work is produced by The Ready, an org design and transformation partner to companies around the world. You can get in touch with us by emailing podcast[at]theready[dot]com. If you like what you're hearing, give us a review, they actually matter. And most importantly, share this show with someone who needs it. We only grow with your help, so we're ready to reach new ears this week. And with that said, thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.