Exploring What We’ve Learned: Celebration Grids
It’s very easy to lose sight of the fact that things are happening all around us, which can serve as learning opportunities. Sometimes, the outcomes from things we try (which we may or may not have framed as “experiments”) might surprise us, and in some cases, they might go more or less as we expected. A key question to be asking, regardless of outcome, is often “What did we learn?” In this post, I’ll describe several ways we can use Celebration Grids, which are one of the many Management 3.0 Practices.
Celebration Grids in Open Space Events
Simply by having an Open Space event, we’re running one big experiment (the event itself), which serves as a container for lots of smaller experiments (most commonly exemplified by separate conversations or talks, which are part of an agenda that is co-created by attendees in real time).
There are numerous ways to employ Celebration Grids during Open Space events, such as:
- As a place to capture reflections on learnings, as they happen (at any point during the event)
- As a means of reflecting back on the experience, at the end of the event
Celebration Grids in Hack-a-Thons, Innovation Days, or Exploration Days
Many organizations set aside time for experimentation, on a regular basis, where the outcomes from those experiments can have numerous benefits, including ideas for improving existing products, or creation of new products. They often use terms like Innovation Days and Exploration Days to describe such events.
Additional examples of such experimentation-focused events include hack-a-thons, which often take place outside of a specific organizational context. Hack-a-thons may even focus on a specific theme, or even seek to make the world a better place, a recent example of which, was the Hack for Black Lives Matter event.
Given the massive focus on innovation and experimentation during events like Hack-a-Thons, Innovation Days, and Exploration Days, we can use Celebration Grids to visually explore what we’ve learned.
Celebration Grids in Retrospectives
Let’s say we’re a member of a single team, or perhaps we’re working as a facilitator with multiple teams. There is a common tendency when working in a team context to be so focused on a short-term objective (like finishing a particular body of work during a Sprint), that we can forget that every Sprint is essentially an experiment.
We can employ a Celebration Grid to acknowledge what we’ve learned, at the end of a Sprint, or perhaps at the end of multiple iterations or Sprints:
- Team Retrospective. We can employ a Celebration Grid during any team retrospective, which helps us remember what we learned, and even more importantly, identify steps we can take to apply what we learned going forward.
- Program Retrospective. During cross-team retrospectives, which some practitioners refer to as “Program Retrospectives,” we can use a Celebration Grid to recognize what we learned while working together on delivery of a particular feature set, for instance.
