Retrospectives at IDEO Europe — Work In Progress

This post is from a new collection called Learning in the Open. It gives a view into my work inside IDEO Europe. The goal is to learn more by increasing transparency.

A few months ago I posted advice on running retrospectives, as I’ve done in the past I shared an internal conversation thread publicly as it had advice useful to anyone working in creative teams. Transparency FTW.

Since then we’ve implemented a ‘Retrospective System’ in IDEO Europe, and we’ve learned plenty of things along the way.

A shout out to Gemma Lord who has driven this forward in the last few months and set the standard for all of us.

What are we learning?

Thinking in Systems

I specifically named our work a ‘Retrospective System’ as we brought rigour to the design an implementation of Retrospectives; they are not a new tool for IDEO as many teams already run them (and of course they have been around for a long time in the world of product design) but we wanted to be consistent in quality — and so a systemic approach was needed.

Retrospectives are a simple and highly effective format, implementing them could be a quick task of delegation, but we wanted to be sure that they would happen consistently and at a high standard.

So the ‘system’ had a few elements:

1. A consistent structure/agenda for Retrospectives
2. A list of ‘qualified’ facilitators
3. A simple way to book a facilitator
4. A digital tool to run the retrospective (assuming teams would be hybrid)
5. Clear accountability for booking, running and delivering actions

Implementing any new behaviour change requires this level of design — much of the work we do at IDEO today is the organisational design needed to unlock innovation — and yet, we didn’t want to overcomplicate something that should ultimately become embedded in all of our projects.

But: systems! Thinking in systems made sure this much more chance of impact. And we quickly saw the benefits; all teams in Europe have immediately adopted this practice and one common piece of feedback was the ‘ease of use’ when adding Retrospectives into busy project schedules

Psychological Safety

The importance of Psychological Safety in high performing teams is well established. It’s something i’m personally very passionate about in my own practice. The teams running retrospectives talked about the high level of safety that the groups experienced. Having an independant facilitator (i.e. not a core team member) was called out as a key factor in this.

I also believe that the context we set for each retro, and the reminder of the ‘Agile Prime Directive’ helped set the right enviroment for learning

“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”

We’ve seen this effect in IDEO only teams, and the joint IDEO/Client teams that are most common in our work today.

Get Embeded

One of the most experienced Facilitators on the Team — Papa Akuffo— surfaced a key insight in our first reflection session: while having external facilitators has helped set a high standard, the ultimate goal should be for teams to run their own Retrospectives.

This gives us a path toward widespread adoption. At first we will set a high standard, build confidence and show the value, but quickly we need to empower everyone to run retros.

Facilitation skills are very common for IDEO Designers, and so i’m confident many more people can’t become great facilitators in the near future.

System Learning

The next big opportunity for us is System Learning: seeing the common patterns across different retros and teams suggests the next part of the system: a way to learn across teams (not just within teams).

We need to decide the right cadence for this reflection, but this is what we’ll implement next. We also need to decide how we will share the things we learn from this cross project reflection — I expect we’ll see process, logistics, content and team insights; so there may be many audiences for these new insights.

More on this in the next update.

Reflections

Retrospectives are not new, or radical. I’m sure people reading this will already be using them. The real goal of our work here was designing for consistent delviery of high quality retrospectives.

In the last 3 years Retrospectives have happend in IDEO, but a spontaneous system will never emerge without structure. This systemic approach is an example of how Design plays a vital role in changing behaviour and changing organisations.

It was also intentionally a simple system. While we could imagine a more complex and intricate system before we started, we actively selected a simple system. This follows Gall’s Law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

If you haven’t ready John Gall’s Systems Bible, I highly recommend it.

We see systems like this as the underpinning of Design Excellence. Team’s can’t consistently achieve excellence without the right team environment, and retros are a quick route to surfacing and tackling team issues.

Excellence is possible without Retros. But it’s much easier with them. But, we’re still early in our journey — more stories as we scale this system.

Learning In The Open