Futurespective: Influencing your team’s future

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.” (Marcus Aurelius)

Any team practising(or claiming to do agile) is well aware of the positive outcomes that retrospectives bring into the project. Retrospectives helps us to refocus our priorities based on our past experiences, identifying potential areas of improvement to help us be more productive and increase delivered value. Retrospectives are derived from the parallel in the medical universe — “retrospective cohort study” where individual circumstances are assessed based on a particular outcome(in software engineering world: successful delivery of a project). Like any other representative study, it suffers from cognitive biases(selection and information bias). In software engineering, such biases results in the discussion being skewed towards perceived problems in the past few weeks(assuming retros happen that often). Typically, an action from a retrospective would be geared towards fixing a problem based on its occurrence in the past(you were trying to get more productive after all), which need not necessarily help the team achieve its goal over the next 6 months(or 2 years, depending on how far you look).

To quote Uncle Bob here, “Agile is not just processes and practices but a belief in achievement”. If agile is all about believing in achievement, we should be able to set goals as a team that we would like to achieve in the future and agree that reality is not necessarily all about harshness and things going wrong all the time. So, once in a while(either during the kick-off of a project or even in the middle of a project), it’s a good exercise to step forward and see where we would like to see ourselves as a team in the next 6 months(or 2 years) and what we would like to achieve in that time-frame. It helps the team to refocus team values and come to a agreement on a common goal and vision, helping us all to be more collaborative in how we can reach the ultimate end goal.

Enter futurespectives. A really retro, retrospective.

“Imagine yourselves in a kick-ass time machine and you decide to land in the future(6 months) and have a peek how the team is performing. You are intrigued to find out that the team has achieved all it’s set goals and objectives of the project and team member satisfaction is at it’s all time high. How did it happen? What were the things that the team did to reach nirvana?”

Given that there is no actual time machine(jeez spoilers) available, the only option you have is to walk backwards to find out how this parallel universe came into existence. Here are some of key things to think about:

1. What’s the *common goal* everyone was trying to move forward to?
2. What did we do *more*?
3. What did we do *less*?
4. What things were *we not sure* that we monitored.

Such a discussion into the perceived future makes few key assumptions:

1. We all agreed and understood that the team had common goals to achieve.
2. We were fully aware of the end goals of the project & team and were in the same page.

Though we cannot be really sure such a universe could exist, we all can agree which actions(success factors) will land us on the happy universe and what(failure factors) will land us on the not so happy parallel universe. Using the outcomes of this brainstorm, we could focus our energies to get our act together towards the happy universe.